


I Don't Hear The Church Bells Chime Anymore

by Noccalula



Series: The Mother We Share: The Maximoff Series [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Age of Ultron, Age of Ultron Spoilers in later chapters, Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers - Freeform, But their sexual relationship isn't the main focal point of the story so, Childhood Trauma, Consensual Underage Sex, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Gen, I'll stop tagging now, Loss of Virginity, Political Uprising, Sibling Incest, Slow Burn, Smut, Stucky - Freeform, This is my first on AO3 so I'm still shit at tagging, Twincest, Twins, but not uncomfortably underage, it's a political revolution so expect some bloodshed, not at first but we'll get there, not the focal point but it is there, which is odd because I normally hate slow burns, yeah - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-08
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-03-29 12:59:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 11
Words: 55,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3897244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Noccalula/pseuds/Noccalula
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The first time they were aware of it, they were thirteen.</i><br/>Having narrowly survived the bombing of their apartment building, Pietro and Wanda carved out the best life they could on the streets in Sokovia, eventually becoming notable figures in the Sokovian resistance. This is the part of their story that the cameras didn't follow: from the Sokov uprisings to the human experimentation, from Sokovia to Korea and all the way to the defeating of Ultron and, ultimately, the end. From start to finish, they never had anything more wholly and fully than they had one another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sokov Punks

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I've been writing fanfic on and off for eons now but this is my first posting to AO3 (or anywhere in at least eight years). I got so swallowed up by my Maximoff feels after seeing AoU that I didn't really have another choice. 
> 
> I can be located on Tumblr as noccalula-writes - please feel free to say hi! 
> 
> Title credit to the song "Coattails" by Broods - essentially the soundtrack to this piece. 
> 
> (actually, the soundtrack is right here: http://8tracks.com/sugarcrunchbuttercup/i-don-t-hear-the-church-bells-chime-anymore )
> 
> Feedback is appreciated, please enjoy.
> 
> Update: I originally had this slated for four chapters but then it... grew.

The first time they were aware of it, they were thirteen. 

Pietro and Wanda had stumbled into an anarchist commune, having fallen as far off the grid as possible to avoid placement into foster care and likely separation; the building had once been a grand hotel during what was supposed to be the economic upturn of Sokovia back in the early 2000’s, before the bottom fell out of the global economy and suddenly America’s monetary flailings were creating ripples that stretched across oceans. They’d met a kid named Alyosha that was maybe eighteen or nineteen and all sharp junkyard angles and scars who had guided them into the dilapidated doorway and up the crumbling stairs until suddenly, they weren’t alone. Young people lay strewn about the halls and in the open rooms, no order and no system, just flags and spray painted slogans of rebellion on the walls. The odd backpack and wad of dingy clothes stayed near its respective owner but otherwise, these kids were all about sharing-as-caring. Pietro and Wanda sat huddled close together and ate some sort of rice-and-bean-and-greens amalgamation that tasted better than the cheese sandwiches they’d taken to stealing from the shopping marts; the others traded stories, breaking the grim atmosphere long enough to break into a few folk songs as one thin boy with a mop of bleached hair played an old guitar. 

Stray dogs congregated around the hall to pick up the scraps, their ribs jutting from beneath dirty fur and their eyes as hollow and haunted as the kids themselves. Pietro in particular liked dogs – they always sort of frightened Wanda – and he reached out to stroke a hand over one’s bony back. The dog skittered violently away and against the wall, caught between the instincts to fight or fly but far too emaciated to put up a convincing fight. Confused, Pietro eased back into his seat with a sympathetic glance towards his canine counterpart. If anything, he could identify with the dog – its fear, pure survival instinct at the highest volume, wild eyes unsure if anything in the great big world around it was friend or foe but willing to bet that (surely based on past experiences from the way the animal flinched) it was the latter. He tossed a crust of bread across and the dog didn’t hesitate to snatch it and run before the others saw, Alyosha cutting him a small smirk.

“We may be poor, but if we eats, everyone eats,” he explained in broken English, gesturing to the dogs that stayed close, “Vanya works for, ah, co-operative? We do field work, we eat what grows, steal from the foreign companies what cannot be grown. Western imperialism will feed us whether they like it or not.” 

Wanda’s big eyes searched the room, a little less hesitant than her big brother’s to seek the silver lining. These kids might have not been the image handed to them in magazines or on the television – no one here was any great marvel of beauty, at least by Westernized standards, but the punks were beautiful in their own right. Errant piercings, dirty skin, matted hair but with big smiles spread across crooked, sometimes broken teeth, set below gaunt cheekbones and wild eyes. She and her brother looked older than their years, mostly due to the shadows near their own eyes, the anger and sadness inside of them, and very few of the commune members ever bothered to ask them how old they were.

In Sokovia, everyone was old enough. Children were adults before their time, working to support failing families or surviving the horrors of war. 

On a wall opposite the one room with empty space was a large mural of a man with an American movie star’s jawline covered in stylized black facial hair. His eyes were painted hollow beneath a suavely styled mop of dark hair, rings on all his fingers and his suit the pattern of an American dollar bill. Horns had been sprayed over his head and what looked like dripping red blood on his hands, yellow flames of hellfire licking up behind him. Whoever had done this had been quite the artist, especially with something as tricky as spraypaint; Wanda had tugged Pietro’s hand to still him before the mural and they both stared in mutual silence at the face of the man who manufactured their parents’ deaths. 

_Tony Stark makes millions on Sokovian blood_

“You like?” Alyosha asked, having paused behind them so quietly that both twins had failed to notice him as he cut his light green gaze up at the painting with scrutiny, “He is the Devil… so many here have lost ones they loved to the bombings.” 

“Our parents,” Wanda spoke softly, her first words since arriving, as Pietro glanced at her in half concern and half irritation at giving away such a personal thing. 

Understanding, Alyosha nodded and stepped back into the open-air room, the door having been ripped from the hinges ages ago. The walls were stained and cracking and the beds were nothing more than pallets of fabric and old mattresses on the floor, but it was better than the alleyways they’d taken to sleeping in and at least marginally warmer. In fact, it was warmer than either of them would have anticipated, Wanda glancing around for some sort of heat source and seeing only the dark corner where a dirty toilet and broken tub and showerhead were hiding. As if he heard the question without any words, Alyosha pointed a thin finger at the dingy windows, covered in ratty blankets. 

“West, sun sets this way. Spends all day baking the room through windows, keeps it warmer for longer. This is why we sleep on this side in the winter and the other wing in the summer, yeah? Smart. Solar panels would be the best thing but ah, no money for that just yet.” 

A short girl with a stockier build and a half-shaved head of henna-red hair entered, her boots loud on the floor as she moved over to Alyosha to greet him with a perfunctory hug before going to hang another blanket on the window. The boy gestured to her and turned back to the twins, his eyes scanning her almost reverently as he reorganized his train of thought for a moment before speaking. 

“This is Vanya, I tell you about her working for the co-op? Vanya, these are friends, new friends from the city. Their parents died in the first wave of bombings.” 

This caught Vanya’s attention and she stopped her ministrations, turning her moon-wide face to them as she stepped down off the window ledge and came to stand before them. Her wide eyes were lovely, Wanda thought for a moment as she remembered a girl from school that had born a resemblance, big and dark like her own. Vanya glanced at Wanda and then turned her gaze to Pietro, eyeing them both up and down for a long moment, full lips pursed. While Alyosha had looked more like scrap metal than young man with his almost feline eyes, his temperament came out much friendlier than Vanya’s quiet reservation.

“And what are your names, friends?” 

Pietro opened his mouth to lie but Wanda spoke first, clear as a bell.

“Wanda.” 

***

When the dark had fallen over the building and only the lights from random candles gave any sight to either of them, Wanda and Pietro lay curled together on a bed of old clothes. It stank less than Wanda had anticipated it would – apparently a few of the commune members washed their clothes with old castile soap in the basins on the roof with rainwater they collected over time – but still smelled old, not quite clean. She remembered their apartment, the way her mother’s perfume smelled, the smell of their old bedding and the tears came unbidden, filling her closed eyes as she tried to ignore the rising lump in her throat. Pietro was warm behind her, big spoon as he’d designated himself some years ago in what was an apt metaphor for their relationship on the whole, his lean boy-body hardened with hunger and muscles beginning to grow more distinct with desperation. She remembered when his face was still a little soft, his cheeks fuller, a spray of dark curls perpetually askew atop his head – back when he was just a boy. But, even at thirteen, Pietro was a man now – his cheeks pronounced and his jaw becoming almost as sharp as their father’s had been. Grown, long before his time and well before his body had the chance to catch up. His eyes always seemed sad to Wanda, even when he was clearly steeling himself against the world around them, trying his hardest to cull his natural empathy away from anyone but Wanda. 

Still, he’d fed the dog – she knew it wasn’t entirely gone. 

Pietro lay silent, his eyes scanning the shape of Alyosha laying atop a dingy mattress, one arm haphazardly thrown across Vanya’s stomach as the two of them murmured softly to one another. He couldn’t make out what they were saying but it sounded gentle, like lover’s admissions or sweet talk; Pietro hadn’t missed the way Alyosha looked at the girl, as though there were no one else in the room for those brief moments. He understood that look, that feeling – it was how he had always looked at Wanda. Except, it had never occurred to him until this moment that perhaps, that might not be normal. Their parents had encouraged them to be close and their culture thought nothing of physical affection between family members. He had only stopped holding Wanda’s hand when the boys in his class began talking about hand-holding as though it were some big ritual they were all competing to achieve in the headlong race into manhood. Wanda, less concerned with the opinions of others, still reached for his hand in busy marketplaces and though he was now struggling with a newly acquired, not entirely understood feeling that his actions would be seen as wrong, he found that most people were willing to dismiss this as typical twin behavior. 

Now, the dots were starting to connect for him, albeit very slowly. The fact of the matter is that their parents’ untimely deaths, the three days they spent clinging to one another in the rubble for dear life had changed them irrevocably, had sent them down a path they otherwise might have never gone down. They had even quietly debated between themselves as to taking new identities, but Wanda insisted she could never pretend that Pietro wasn’t her brother, that they were practically the same person at the end of the day and she wasn’t willing to let what family she now clung to go, even in the name of protecting themselves. Pietro tightened his arm around Wanda ever so slightly and felt the troubling give beneath her ribs; she was getting to be as bony as the stray dogs that hung around the commune. Still, the ritual was anchoring and calming for him as he put his face against the back of her head and into the nest of her long hair. They weren’t as clean as they had once been, and they were both ashamed enough of that without mentioning it, but she still smelled like herself – which was to say, she still smelled like home. 

Trauma had blunted their mutual awareness of it but puberty was slowly but surely beginning for the both of them, no matter how much older they might have passed for. Faint stirrings sitting low in their bellies, the tightening strings of their chests when they curled up together, the buzzing curiosity about one another were starting to make themselves known again now that they had a roof over their heads and a safe-ish place to sleep. While Wanda fought back nostalgia – painful, awful beast that it was to remember – Pietro watched as the candle in the room was blown out and the contrast of his vision turned down until Alyosha and Vanya were only dark figures on their mattress. Even though she was giving no outward indication, Pietro knew instinctively that Wanda was crying and pressed his face gently against the back of her neck, whispering imperceptibly soft against her skin until she shifted slightly, pressing her torso back against his as he tightened his hold on her again. 

Eyes adjusting and unsleeping, Pietro began to take notice of the faint noises coming from the bed – sharp little whispers, breathy sighs, the small moans and squeaks of the mattress beneath them as Alyosha climbed on top of Vanya beneath their blanket. Pietro froze for a second, his heart stilling in his chest as surprise and the curious feeling that he was watching something terribly forbidden overtook him as his mouth fell slightly slack. Little wet sounds, kissing perhaps, sounds that he still wasn’t acquainted with himself came from the couple a few feet away and he realized that he was holding his breath, afraid of being heard and discovered, called a pervert and thrown out of the only place that promised some degree of safety for the time being. He wanted to shake Wanda, turn and look in her eyes to gauge just how he should be reacting, but he was afraid to even move lest he be discovered doing this wicked but thrilling thing. However, he didn’t have to make any moves – Wanda, sensing her brother’s sudden stillness and alarm, had opened her eyes and now noticed the very same things.

They lay in perfect silence through the entire thing, maybe ten minutes of soft grunting and moaning and the distant sounds of others down the hall engaged in similar activities. No matter how much the Maximoff twins had felt like adults since they were thrust out on their own, they were acutely aware of their own youth and naivety in those moments – especially so as their youth and naivety fled them. The weight of new knowledge had settled over both of them and they considered that perhaps they should be feeling shame, but instead of pushing away, they pulled closer together there in their pile of old rags. 

It was the first time Pietro ever remembered Wanda feeling less like his sister and more like hot lead in his arms, and he awoke with an erection that he quickly hid and tried desperately to ignore. 

Three months later, he lost his virginity to Vanya in the same room after Alyosha was shot by military police during a riot. Wanda never mentioned it, knew about this transgression without his so much as hinting, and he knew that for reasons they could never explain to normal people, it had hurt her. He regretted it for the rest of his life. He bleached his hair white for the first time the next day.


	2. Black Bags

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The revolution will be televised - and live streamed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I said this was going to be four chapters.
> 
> I lied.
> 
> The reception I've gotten has been wonderfully kind - thank you so much to everyone who has made me feel so welcome. 
> 
> Might I suggest Hol Baumann's "Breathe" as a soundtrack to this chapter?
> 
> Warning: somewhat graphic depictions of violence ahead.

Four Years Later

The Maximoff twins were no longer just living at the commune, they were practically running it.

In the few years between, casualties during dust ups with the police and during the increasingly violent raids of government safehouses were becoming the norm. Protesting groups of all stripes lost leaders and laymen alike in hails of bullets or government snipers that of course no one could corroborate the existence of without looking like a conspiracy theorist loon. The Sokovian government could eradicate the rebellion like a plague of rats, unchecked in their power and armed against the working class who had nothing more than handmade weapons and incredibly poor organization skills. It seemed the movement would be short lived and bloody as the members of the rebellion either died in the streets or abandoned ship out of fear. The end was nigh.

That is, until raw cell phone footage of Sokovian troops gunning down civilians hit the internet.

CNN, Fox News, MSNBC , BBC, Al-Jazerra – everybody was running the horrific scene every twenty minutes on the nose, the death porn industry that was 24 hour news making sure there was no one in the western world unaware of what the ‘savages’ in Eastern Europe were doing to one another. Outcry from the public came in bigger numbers than was anticipated from first-world countries across the globe and while the protesters were unconvinced of the efficacy of this at first, it resulted in a United Nations council meeting and intervention, foreign diplomats coming as humanitarians and attempting to cull the violence. A meeting was set between government officials and prominent figures of the rebellion – including Vanya herself – to attempt a first round of peace talks.

It accomplished nothing. The Sokovian government wanted passive compliance, the protesters wanted independence from the system, and sitting down at a nice table to find middle ground had quickly erupted into a near violent verbal confrontation. The United Nations threw up their hands and walked away but left the parting gift of increased public awareness and a stern warning that militarized action – likely a visit from the US military – would take place if the government didn’t stop gunning down their own people. A ground war and foreign occupation – exactly what no one at the summit wanted.

Of course, no one listened when the protesters pointed out that they were being shot with American-supplied guns.  

Still, the game had changed. Wanda and Pietro were becoming looked to for leadership if only for the fact that they had been there almost longer than anyone else save Vanya – most of the kids that were older than them had either become disenchanted with the movement before the read bloodshed began and traded in their punk roots for a more secure place in the establishment, had been injured or even killed when the riots started, or (most disturbingly) simply disappeared. Vanya was black-bagged during a protest and never seen again. Pietro did his best to not think too much about it, to keep his eyes on the mission that he and his sister had so vehemently undertaken: making sure the public knew what a monster Tony Stark and his western imperialist death machine was. Graffiti of the Iron Man suit, laden with dollar signs and clutching AK47’s began to crop up on public buildings and much to the surprise of the general public were not immediately painted over.

The Maximoffs had built a name for themselves inside of the counter-culture in a very short time. It wasn’t uncommon for Sokovian kids to have horror stories about the war, about atrocities committed unto them or the terrible deaths and injuries that befell those they loved, but something about seeing that mural on the hotel wall every day had driven them both deeper into their hatred, harder against their righteous fury until it burned in the pits of their eyes in a way that made the others stop and take notice. And, as it turned out, they were both better strategists than even they had anticipated when they began to realize that, hesitantly, they had become de facto leaders in the commune. While Wanda remained more upfront (albeit quieter) and favored the hammer fall of direct action, Pietro had become deviously clever in his own right. Wanda often lost sight of the trees in her quest for the forest, but Pietro could acquaint himself with every tree at whatever detail necessary to make sure his sister was protected and their plans were solid.

Wanda had laid out plans, proposed ideas for the furthering of their cause. No more sneaky shoplifting from the chain stores in the name of rebellion – the name of the new game was full independence from the Sokovian government in so long as it insisted on not resisting the westernized fascism that had taken it over since the war. They would confer with another sect of Sokovian separatists that called themselves The Red and Black, a resistance cell that was now being called a terrorist organization despite its only violent history being against government property and in physical defense of its own people, and merge resources. This split the wheat from the chaff in what remained of the original commune members, a few claiming that this change was “too radical” and not pacifist enough for what they were attempting to achieve. Pietro argued that they had never truly been pacifists before and no longer had a reason to be, especially given how much violence and death had been visited upon them by the very government designed to protect them.

“So, what?” Pietro had asked incredulously, moving from around the table to speak to the group assembled, “We sit, wait for our rights to be handed back? We ask the Imperialist Dog politely to return to its kennel in the West and for our leaders to wake up? How many more of us will die before that happens? How many more sacrifices will we be making in the name of ‘passive resistance’?”

“Is this what Alyosha would have wanted here?” asked Serge, a thin young man with eyes that were a dimming fire with the knowledge that this was a battle he had already lost, “Do you not remember how Alyosha said of the police, ‘They are people too’?”

Pietro paused, mostly for dramatic effect as he looked around to the gathered congregation with vaudevillian surprise on his face – and he knew in his heart of hearts that he would have made a terrible public speaker in any other setting but it was kind of nice to entertain the notion that he was some sort of Pied Piper here among the undesirables – and turned to look back at Wanda. She shrugged lightly, her long dark hair hanging messily over her shoulder, eyes rimmed in the black liner she had taken to stealing (before her own moratorium on the practice) from the local mart along with a few nice tubes of dark lipstick.

“’People, too’? People, too…” Pietro repeated, shaking his head and raking back his hair that was yellowing at the bleached parts as his dark roots grew longer and longer, “People, too put two bullets in the back of Alyosha’s head. I _watched_ it, Serge. I watched him hit the pavement and his blood spill out into the gutter. Alyosha is dead. ‘People, too’ killed him. There is no going back.”

Wanda fought the small curve of a smile on her dark lips. There was nothing worth smiling about regarding Alyosha’s death – it had been among the more horrible things she’d ever witnessed in her short, violent life – but the way Pietro had come into his own as a motivator was an impressive thing. He’d gotten bigger, shoulders broadening over his narrow waist, still too thin for a young man his size but doing better than they had been. His eyes reminded her more and more of their mothers’ every day, big and blue and almost hound-doggedly sad in shape. Yet despite being malnourished and always a little dirty, Pietro had become a big hit with the girls (and a few of the boys) with the commune as well as on the street – he had been propositioned more times than he could count and probably could have made a decent living as a prostitute had he been of the inclination to do so. Genetics had blessed him and there were very few among the commune who didn’t notice.

Of course, the same could be said of Wanda – beautifully frail, her thin ribs and shoulders, appealing to every man or boy with a secret desire to heal the broken bird of fragile femininity. Her eyes had only become wider on her gaunt little face, her mouth now painted burgundy more often than not. The makeup had become a sort of war paint for her, half to combat the perception of her as weak for being so waifish and half because she simply liked how fierce it made her feel, how harshly it defined her features. Her eyes held pain by the oceans, her lips spoke the awful truths that no one wanted to hear – by highlighting these with the dark colors she favored, she made herself unignorable. _You can refuse to see me_ , she would think as she stared down the barrel of a police rifle or shouted into the myriad of cameras filming the ‘unrest’ on the streets for the Western world’s entertainment, _But you can’t refuse to look into my eyes. You cannot make me invisible. You cannot deny my rage_.

Despite their appeal, the twins were well known for their lack of consorting with the others in any real capacity. They were a present and attentive part of the circle, but everyone knew that they had a world of their own to which no one else was invited. Pietro flirted frequently and kissed often but since Vanya’s disappearance had yet to go any further. Wanda, somewhat intimidating in her intensity, had refused every potential suitor with cool indifference, disliking the even the casual touch of anyone who wasn’t her brother. She did not hug, she did not hold hands, and she slept only beside Pietro or on the rare occasion alone. Whispers had of course been raised about their behavior, but as Pietro remembered from the world before the bombs, it was chalked up mainly to ‘weird twin behavior’ and their shared losses. Still, it was a fairly well accepted fact that if either of them were in love, it was with one another.  

What was never discussed, not even between the twins themselves, was that Wanda didn’t experience sexual attraction without an extreme emotional bond. She experienced arousal, sure, but the notion of allowing anyone but the one person she loved dearly to touch her made her skin crawl. It had been four years since they arrived, they were seventeen now – they were hardly children back then and were even less so now. Wanda understood why others might want sex as a distraction or even just for the pleasure of it, but she never could align her own feelings this way. There was only one person she ever pictured during the every-other-moon times that she fantasized, and in the subsequent years since her sexual (or non-sexual) awakening, she had moved far beyond the inner conflict of whether or not it was wrong or moral. Morality was a gray scale that allowed some men to profit billions at the blood and suffering of others while being worshipped by an entire country and simultaneously condemned women who didn’t conform to a religious ideology about their bodies. Morality had become a useless notion to Wanda, and there were worse things in the world that she could have done than been in love with Pietro. At the end of the day, it had been somewhat surprising how very easy it was to come to terms with.

It was especially easy considering that she knew without a doubt that Pietro felt the same way, in regards to their relationship at any rate. Where it came to sexual attraction, Pietro found himself somewhere near diametrically opposite of Wanda’s feelings – he was sexually attracted to damn near everyone. It felt like second nature to him to think of the way Vanya’s thick curves felt under his hands, her strong legs around his waist, how he’d never been able to conjure even in his wildest fantasies exactly how intense it had felt to put the most sensitive part of himself into the hot, wet core of her. Granted, he had come in less than two minutes so it wasn’t the spectacular sexual premiere he’d been hoping for, but Vanya had laughed softly despite her grief and patted his back. Sexual compulsion wracked Pietro the way it often did teenage boys and he counted on sporadic making out and borderline compulsive masturbation to curve the urges as often as he could. To the outside observer, nothing was stopping him from fucking a swath through the available commune talent pool – he was good looking, well spoken, and blessed with the very attractive fire of conviction. His loving devotion to his sister only increased his stock value.

However, the look in Wanda’s eyes when he emerged from the bathroom the morning after he had slept with Vanya send a jolt down to his toes that reminded him any time he got too close to the temptation: _don’t hurt Wanda_. He’d spent enough time in the last few years pondering his own ideas about morality and where he stood in relation to his extreme attachment to her – it had taken him less time than it had taken Wanda to connect those feelings to sexual attraction and that realization had nearly knocked the wind out of him – and though his sister had seemed untroubled by their exclusivity to one another, he had struggled. He wondered what his parents would think of them here, spooned together on the dirty mattress that became theirs as he thought for the millionth time about pressing his ever-present erection against her, kissing the back of her neck, trying to show her the depth of what he felt for her.

Maybe they’d be disgusted. Maybe they’d just be grateful they still had one another after everything that had happened. No way to know, no use in wondering, and the longer Pietro listened to the others opine about public morality and societal expectations and the more he listened to them dissect what was inherent knowledge and what was socialized opinion, the more he considered that maybe the shame he only ever half-heartedly felt was his attempts at righting a perceived wrong. Maybe underneath that self-loathing was the knowledge that he loved someone so purely and incredibly that he had to try to tell himself he didn’t deserve it. Pietro tried to chase every water-drop argument all the way back up the faucet to scream at the source but it never became clearer, so he stopped trying to convince himself of anything and just settled for feeling it quietly.

Whatever was stopping him from acting now, though, he wasn’t sure. He and Wanda would lie wide awake for hours at night in total silence, only listening to the soft cadence of their breathing and their almost mutual heartbeat, perfectly synched so that it sounded as though there were only one between them. They had first noticed that as children and it gave them an immeasurable comfort that it had never changed – his heart plugging away in his chest at the same pace as hers, their pulses matching, their lives congruent. Pietro would sometimes whisper at the back of her neck the way he always had, some little word of encouragement or a reminder of how much she meant to him, and he was pleasantly rewarded with the small shiver up her spine that came when he did it just right but that aside, neither of them ever made a move. Wanda might have worried that she was somehow deficit, not attractive enough for him, if he were anyone else; Pietro had never stopped going out of his way to remind her she was beautiful, powerful, and strong or that he was in awe of her and everything she did. For her own part, Wanda never had to open her mouth – she could cast a long gaze at her brother and he would know exactly what she was thinking.

 _I love you. You are everything to me_.

As far as support went, one could do far worse.

***

The merge with The Red and Black proved successful. The commune began to trade their home-grown food for protection, giving the locations to their hidden greenhouses and rooftop farms as collateral for an increased presence during protests. In a post-footage world, the militarized police had been forced to stand down at least partially. The plus side of this was that civilian and protester deaths were at an all-time low since the worst of the conflict had begun – no officer wanted to be seen committing such an atrocity on a global scale and bring on the occupation that the United Nations had threatened. The downside of this, of course, was that the Sokovian government had zero intention of stopping the campaign to rid themselves of the rebellion and were thusly forced to become much more covert with their dispatchings. Black-bagging had become all the more common since Vanya was taken, protesters snatched into unmarked vans in broad daylight as a smoke grenade or something more innocuous went off down the street, attracting media attention. This made the protesters sitting ducks if they didn’t mind their formations tightly, keeping a close eye on one another – a tough thing to do in the chaos of street demonstration.

The Red and Black were on average darker skinned and eyed than most of their Sokovian compatriots, having experienced a greater deal of prejudice than their whiter brothers and sisters. They were expertly trained at hand to hand combat and gave no explanation as to where this skill was obtained, though Pietro had a good eye for this sort of thing and commented privately to Wanda that it looked a lot like what the Israeli army used. The Maximoffs’ parentage of Romani Jews served them well in this respect – a great deal of this cell was Romani or Romani descended themselves. The blood bonds still ran deep, especially there in the trenches where the chasm of Us vs. Them widened every day. While the commune failed to take on the basic hand-to-hand that they were taught in any meaningful way, they were exceptionally grateful at the feeling of protection at their backs every time the police vans circled around as the cameras were pushed back, stubbornly orbiting the front lines.

It was one such afternoon that Wanda and Pietro found themselves front and center before an American camera crew, fists raised high as they shouted the unified chants into the streets. Civilians slowed to watch them and observe the ruckus, mostly making faces that were torn between fear and defeat. The status quo had beaten the working class down until it robbed them of even the illusion that fighting back would do any good; as Pietro pointed out often, “They don’t even know there’s a choice.” But the passion of youth was not so easily defeated and while the commune might not have had the kind of numbers that Wanda was hoping for, it did add to its ranks exponentially that year. The hope she carried was that by setting an example, by showing the citizens of Sokovia that independence from a corrupt government was possible, others would become brave enough to make the jump and abandon the capitalist system that held them enslaved. Pietro took special care not to crush her dream as he treated all aspects of Wanda as precious, but he was not so convinced that it would be that simple. The life might have been droll and terrible, but people craved the familiar even when the familiar was pretty awful.

The sight of the cameras excited Wanda, a buzzing all the way down into her toes as she shouted herself hoarse, fist in the air as she stood next to her brother. She could feel his heart pounding alongside her own with adrenaline, half from their convictions and half with the awareness that they could be gassed or hit with rubber bullets at any point in time – and that was the better scenario if the police became involved. Wanda’s t-shirt was stained with age, hanging on her thin frame as if on a clothes hanger, Pietro’s track jacket on her shoulders as she was more prone to be cold than he. In the crowd of commune protesters, he listened with some degree of joy as their voices intermingled and disappeared into one another’s, into the mass of youths demanding change.

Their new comrades held close to the edges as they took part in the action, wary eyes watching the cavalcade of police vans as they began to circle near the cameras. The news crews moved quickly to catch footage of the black-clad armed forces as they scuttled into formation like one giant spider, legs akimbo and waiting to capture the crowd if it dared move forward. This only spurred on the protesters into louder shouting, harder chanting, defiant in the face of oppression. Wanda’s heart was in her throat – Pietro’s too, she knew – as they were pushed towards the front line of police and she stared at her own reflection in the officers’ masks. Her jutting cheekbones beneath her big, black-rimmed eyes burned back at her and she focused her gaze intently as though she could break the glass with it, trying to bore her vision to his and thinking so loudly that she felt for a moment that surely he could hear her.

_I know you’re in there, pig. I know you see me, oppressor. You want to kill me? You will look me in the face and you will remember that state sanctioned murder is still murder. My face will haunt you forever._

“NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE, BOYCOTT SOKOVIA’S FASCIST LEASH! NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE, BOYCOTT SOKOVIA’S FASCIST LEASH!”

Smaller groups of officers attempted to push against the protesters from the sides but were met with resistance they weren’t anticipating in the form of The Red and Black. The stronger, bigger members pushed back until the wall of shields forced the police to abandon the task, stumbling backwards and startled by this unabashed act of defiance. Suddenly, a Molotov struck the side of a building and alighted into a trash can, sending a spray of flames up the nearby wall and igniting chaos. The police unfurled their batons and began to tear into the fray, shouting orders to stand down despite their being the only ones armed – Pietro would later swear to Wanda he had watched an officer light the Molotov and she didn’t doubt him. It only took a few pushes and punches from the resistance to send the entire crowd into utter bedlam, the sound of a gun going off somewhere in the distance plunging everything into panic. The news crews were knocked astride, cameras clattering to the ground as backup police force arrived and began to grab protesters by whatever they could reach, be it their hair or backpacks.

A woman in a skirt suit turned to the camera behind her, her microphone clutched tight in her hand and began yelling, “The protesters have turned on the camera crew! The police are now trying to get the crowd under control but rioters have begun to burn the buildings!”

“No!” Pietro cried out, lunging towards the woman with a hand outstretched as Serge caught him beneath the ribs, trying to pull him away to safety, “It was not us! They are attacking us! They are attac-“

Pietro’s frantic eyes fluttered as he felt Serge being ripped away from him with a screech, the sickening cracking sound that followed informing him of what was happening right behind him. As he whirled around he found Serge curling into a ball on the pavement, blood running down from his face as he cried out “STOP” and “PLEASE” at the anonymous black figure. Pietro’s heart pounded war drums in his chest as he looked around frantically for Wanda. His eyes locked hers across the way as she reached out towards Serge, her face warping with a scream of “HELP HIM” as the crowd surged back and pulled her with, and suddenly Pietro had a choice to make. The officer raised his arm again, baton held high and flicking blood into the air, and suddenly it wasn’t a choice at all. He was back in the apartment, watching his parents be swallowed up by the chasm in the floor, lying pressed against Wanda as they stared at the shell marked STARK for two whole days before they were saved.

He lunged forward, spearing the officer beneath the ribs and tackling him to the ground as Serge scrambled to get to his feet and fell, too concussed to move functionally on his own. The rage in Pietro had rendered his fists numb, his teeth clacking together hard with impact until he tasted his own blood in his mouth. He hardly had seconds before another baton came down hard between his shoulder blades, sending a scorch of pain lighting up his spine before a second crack struck him again. Though it was far too loud, far too scrambled for it to be possible, he swore he heard Wanda screaming in the distance and the sound twisted his very heart in his chest.

“Don’t get up!” shouted the office through the muffle of his mask, “Stay down!”

Moving slowly, Pietro writhed in an attempt to get to his feet, every instinct telling him to run, run, run before they kill him the way they killed Alyosha those few years ago. Serge was staggering ahead, making it only a few feet before he was swarmed by officers who were in turn swarmed by protesters, the mob becoming angry enough to fight for their lives with their bare hands and whatever tools they could find. There was a distinct FWOOSH of a large projectile, then screams as a torrent of rubber bullets came hailing across from a parked van – the metaphorical and literal big guns coming out since murder on national television had become verboten. Pietro’s blurring vision struggled to focus intently enough to locate his sister, his fear a metallic taste in his mouth as it tried to form her name loud enough for her to hear. Another crack came down near the base of his neck and the entire world whirled into blackness as the smoke of teargas began to burn his lungs, his arms curling up to protect his head before his lights went out.

A scream tore through Wanda’s throat as she saw her brother struck again by the officer and she began to flail wildly, attempting to tear her thin limbs from the grasp of whoever was pulling her back. A young man from the new merger grabbed ahold of the officer’s arm as he raised the baton again, yanking it back into a clean snap at the elbow and incapacitating him almost instantaneously. He was reaching down to grab ahold of Pietro when the officer who had been tackled reared back and with sickening accuracy, bashed his baton straight into the man’s skull. Wanda gaped in horror as she saw his skull give, bone caving way to brutal force, blood rushing from the young man’s nose as he became as limp as a ragdoll and crashed to the pavement. Scarlet blood pooled around them as the officer struggled to get his legs from beneath Pietro’s dead weight, his gloved hands grabbing for her brother’s shoulders.

_They’re going to kill us. They’re going to kill Pietro. They’re going to kill us._

Not ‘they’re going to kill him’. They’re going to kill _us_. She was sure the heartbeat they shared would take them both simultaneously one of these days so that one would never know the pain of living without the other.

The whir of a helicopter above them didn’t even register as another round of teargas came crashing into the square, this fumes wafting quickly now towards her sect of the crowd. Managing to tear one hand free, Wanda scrambled to reach into her satchel to retrieve the washcloth soaked with goat’s milk, the race against time to get it against her face before the smoke incapacitated her a losing battle when all she could think was how she had to run into the fog, towards the danger to get to Pietro immediately. There was a loud popping as another set of smoke bombs went off, obfuscating the view of where the cameras and vans had once been. Wanda stumbled forward, crying out for her brother and nearly tripping across what had to be a human lying prone on the ground but unable to stop and look when all she could think was _Pietro, Pietro, Pietro_.

Through the thickening haze, she managed to catch a glimpse of the blue of her brother’s track pants, his shock of bleached hair as two guards pulled him up from the pavement and quickly forced a black bag over his head. Pietro didn’t fight back, limp and likely unconscious but still breathing, still fighting it – Wanda could feel his heart hammering inside her own chest. The bag. This was it, Wanda thought. They were going to take him away to wherever they took Vanya. Of any fate she could imagine, the only ones worse than death involved being separated from her brother, and there was no way in any hell imaginable that Wanda wasn’t going to try to fight to save him. Though her eyes were beginning to sting horribly and her breath hitched on the fumes, she summoned her strength of will and lunged forward at the sidewalk in a last ditch attempt to grab onto her brother and pull him away.

However, her efforts were in vain – the moment she launched herself, a thick arm caught her around the waist and dragged her backwards into the waiting arms of someone else, and the last thing she saw before a sharp blow came down upon her was the cloth of a black bag being pulled over her face.


	3. Red Fields

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _They were now aware of their mutual heartbeat. “One heart,” they called it. Our heart._
> 
> _“It will stop beating at the same time,” Pietro reminded her often when she felt anxious or sad, “So that we will never be without one another, Wandika.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I continue to be mindblown at how kind, specific and enthusiastic everyone who has commented has been regarding this story. Please know that I'm always writing two chapters ahead of everything that is being posted, so there is always more coming and soon - I promise not to abandon this fic until it's done, which will likely be between 6 and 8 chapters (with an epilogue). 
> 
> Might I suggest "Death Is A Disease" by Clint Mansell for atmospheric listening? (I can also post a track list if anyone is interested - I may playlists for everything I write and the music - particularly the Broods song and a few things by VAST - is a huge part of the story). 
> 
> Again, thank you all so much for your kindness and I hope you continue to enjoy - my door is always open if you have questions or comments.

Some Hours Later

Wanda remembered a meadow near the house she and Pietro had lived in as small children.

Contrary to how it sometimes felt, they hadn’t lived in the apartment forever. In fact, maybe two years had passed between their moving to the city and the bombing that took their parents away; before then, they had lived in what had been a great aunt’s cottage near the outskirts of town, gifted to their mother after the aunt’s death. The house had once been part of a larger farm but time and wear had brought the barn down into a shambled mess of old wood that the twins were warned not to play in for fear of venomous snakes or rusted nails. The economy had begun its downslide the year before the move, their bills becoming too large to manage on the big property and the responsibilities too many for parents who both worked to take care of their family. Their mother had cried for days when the realization finally came between herself and her husband that they would have to sell the cottage for an efficiency apartment in the city if they wanted to have any sort of life at all. College was a far distant dream, one that she had for both of her children, but it would rest solely on them to obtain scholarships and head out abroad. For the time being she had their current education to pay for as well as the necessities of food, electricity and clothing.

Wanda and Pietro spent a lot of time alone as they grew up. The other children that lived on the outskirts came to visit and play from time to time, often with Pietro calling himself Captain Sokovia and imitating the legends about America’s fallen hero as he led his band of scrappy Slavic Howling Commandos into battle. Tomin, a boy only a year or so older than the twins himself and thusly the usual boss of everyone (who ironically only ever wanted to play The Red Skull), insisted that Wanda couldn’t play unless she wanted to be someone’s wife, that there had been no women heroes in the war and therefore women could not be heroes. He taunted her that she had no place in the boys’ games until she cried, which never took long.

It hadn’t taken long for Pietro to walk over and succinctly punch Tomin right in the eye, either.

“She can be whoever she wants!” he had hissed at the boy on the ground, going to put his arms around Wanda’s shoulders and comfort her but she had already stopped crying, her big eyes peering down at Tomin with gleeful retribution.

Needless to say, Tomin found new friends after that. Unfortunately, so did most of the rest of the boys, resulting in the great deal of afternoons that the Maximoff twins spent alone in the meadow. Small yellow flowers grew wild across the entire green acre, a bramble for berries growing at the far end but only ripening for those few sweet weeks at the beginning of summer. Sometimes, Wanda would steal a tablecloth from the kitchen and trot out into the grass, unrolling the fabric so that they would have somewhere to lay and watch the clouds; other times, they would explore the treeline at the edge, darting back and forth across the small stream and trying to catch frogs and insects with their little bare hands. Wanda was nowhere as squeamish as the other boys might have thought of her – she loved the feel of wet dirt between her fingers or peeling bark beneath her palms, the quickening of a fish escaping her grasp in the water or just the cold spring water itself. She and Pietro would collect flat, sun-baked stones and take turns skipping them down the creek rather than across.

But her favorite afternoons were usually the ones they spent together on the tablecloth, sometimes quiet and sometimes talking ceaselessly to one another about everything they could think of, their little hands interlocked. They were now aware of their mutual heartbeat. “One heart,” they called it. O _ur heart_.

“It will stop beating at the same time,” Pietro reminded her often when she felt anxious or sad, “So that we will never be without one another, Wandika.”

Oddly, Wanda found herself standing in that same field now.

The yellow flowers were in full bloom, their surprisingly hearty petals drooping in different directions as insects lazily dipped about beneath a sky painted mostly pink. She closed her eyes, enjoying the feeling of the breeze dragging her long hair back over her shoulders and whipping her skirt gently around her legs. Pietro was here with her – she knew it without so much as opening her eyes – but when she did finally turn to look for him, he was nowhere in sight. This seemed alarming, the fact that she knew he was near but could not see him, and she turned to begin walking back towards the cottage under the pretense that perhaps he had gone home to eat, to see their parents. However, in the distance was nothing but a green hill under the same pink sky, the dilapidated barn the only thing still standing on the property as even the broken old fence was gone. Wanda paused, a feeling of dread beginning to coil into her belly.

_Where is he?_

The low rolling of thunder began in the distance as the sky darkened quicker than she could have anticipated. Fearing lightning in this wide, flat place, Wanda turned to frantically look for anywhere to hide but found that even the trees were gone, replaced with fields of yellow flowers turning a deep red in a slow, sickening crawl towards her. For lack of better option she crouched low, hands above her head as her heart began racing in fear, the chemical flush making her stomach feel bottomless and cold. The yellow flowers were now mere inches from her face and she watched as the center stamen began to fill like a drinking straw with something dark. Her eyes widened as she reached out to touch it hesitantly with shaking fingers, only finding that a swirling red ether was extending from the tips of her fingers. Her mouth fell open as she watched in rapt fascination and horror, the wisps moving snakelike of their own accord and nudging the flower, causing a few drops to begin spilling over onto the petals so that she could now see exactly what it was.

Blood. Ruby red blood, dripping from the flowers around her.

“Wanda!”

Her eyes tried to snap open but slammed shut again as the glare of overhead lights pierced into them, disorienting her further. However, she was flooded with relief at the familiarity of Pietro’s voice and the warmth of his hands as he grabbed her bony shoulders and shook her lightly. She squinted up at him as the haloed light around his head made him look like some sort of dirt-smeared, bloody angel.

“Wha…” she trailed off, her voice caught in the hoarseness of her throat as her head pounded in agony, “The..f… what happened?”

Pietro, considerably more alert, checked her pupils to see if she had a concussion and found nothing conclusive, moving his rough hands to the sides of her face, “Black bags. I woke up here a few minutes ago, you were having nightmares.”

As her vision focused on his face, relief and fear flooded her at once until her lower lip was trembling and her eyes began to spill over, “I thought you were going to die, I saw them hit you.”

Lowering his forehead to hers, Pietro felt something horribly tight began to loosen and unfurl in his chest, the sharp spike of anxiety diminishing now that he knew she was alive, speaking and at least marginally functional. He exhaled a shuddering breath, nose to hers as he kept her face in his hands. Her own thin fingers came up to wrap around his wrists as if she were afraid he could be pulled away from her at any moment.

“No, no, I told you,” he murmured, and without thinking leaned down to press his chapped lips chastely against hers again and again, “Together, remember? Not today, not today…”

It wasn’t the first time they had kissed on the lips - they were siblings after all, and society at large saw nothing abnormal about kisses between children - but this was the first time in years. Perhaps if this had occurred on the mattress in their room at the commune or standing on the rooftop, hands planted on the siding as they stared out at the city and then at one another - like it had almost happened a thousand times - the floodgates might have opened. But here, there was nothing sexual or charged about it save perhaps the raw emotion flood they were both experiencing and the need to remind one another that they were there, still there, always there.

Wanda sat up with a groan, putting her arms around Pietro’s shoulders and resting her face aside his, finally taking the opportunity to get a look at the room. She had been expecting something more like a dungeon, maybe: a naked bulb flickering from the ceiling, concrete walls and metal folding chairs. But this room looked more like the modern hospitals she passed on the more affluent side of town or on the American ER show that her mother used to watch, all white lights muted behind bar covers and clean, sterile medical equipment. She and Pietro had been laid out on patient beds, the crinkling paper beneath them stained with their blood and sweat. Absolutely nothing about this room said that they had been kidnapped to be held prisoner or executed, and somehow that made it all the more terrifying. Besides, now that they had confirmed that the both of them were alright they could focus on the pant-shitting terror of remembering that they had been black bagged and taken somewhere they didn’t know.

Before Pietro could try the door for a potential escape, it opened to reveal Serge, shuffling in with an ice pack held to the side of his head. Wanda sat up straighter, moving as if to curl behind Pietro like a frightened cat until she realized that this was no stranger. Her brother made a noise of confused excitement and took a step toward his comrade before halting himself in his tracks, the glacial wall of distrust shooting back up at record speed as the pieces came together more clearly.

“Serge?” he asked with accusation in his voice.

Giving a small groan in response, Serge cut his eyes up to Pietro’s and then Wanda’s before moving to seat himself on a small bench against the wall, “Comrades. Give them hell, yeah?”

“What exactly is happening here?” Wanda nearly snarled, her fear galvanizing into anger, which was of course a far more protective shell, “Where are we?”

Serge sighed, removing the pack so that he could look up at the both of them. Somehow he seemed different now than he had at the commune - smarter perhaps, or maybe just less naïve. Pietro always found Serge’s ideals to be less realistic than the others, much like Alyosha before him. Both of them were kind to a fault, and being so altruistic had gotten Alyosha killed and Serge nearly so before Pietro had risked life and limb to protect him. Getting his own surge of anger, the Maximoff brother came to stand before Serge and crossed his arms, glaring down at his maybe-compatriot.

“It was not supposed to go like that,” Serge admitted drolly, sitting up straighter and running his hand over his buzzcut, “Smoke bombs make the screen, we get you both out, the violence was not necessary. And clearly, even they can’t keep their own persons straight in the crowd. I could have been killed had you not stepped in, Pietro.”

“Serge,” Wanda said quietly as she rose to her feet, not believing what she was hearing.

“Istvan,” Not-Serge corrected her, watching with casual disinterest at the two of them as they moved together – he had anticipated that.

“You work for the government this entire time,” Pietro glowered, his voice cutting dangerously low, “You sell us out for, what? Safety? A seat at the foot of the throne like a dog?”

“Actually, no. I work for a, uh… much more _private_ organization than the Sokovia, something with its eyes on a much bigger prize, yes?” Istvan-Serge responded amiably, as if he were simply discussing business, “They have had eyes on the commune for some time now and believe it to be the breeding ground for the assets that will save Sokovia, perhaps even the world, from the Avengers. From Tony Stark.”

This silenced both twins for a moment as they looked to one another for a reaction. Although neither was completely convinced there was no need to safeguard against a physical attack, this new information was unignorable, though the both of them felt it sounded just a little too good to be true. Without so much as a word, they communicated this to one another – Wanda’s hand going to the back of her brother’s arm, his leaning slightly towards her as they both hesitantly considered these words.

Pietro eased into a crouch before Istvan-Not-Serge, cocking his head slightly, “…keep talking.”

“Is a project, not exactly legal. Volunteers are hard to come by, but when I met you both I thought, ‘You know what? They just might do it. They just might be the ones,’” Istvan continued, careful to keep watch of the twins’ eyes and speak to them both as he dropped his tone, “Human experimentation. The Germans did it in World War Two, the Americans did it and create Captain America, the legend. The plan is to take humans and enhance them, make them more than they are. The world hears every day of some new person with untold power, but they seem to be recruited by the first world before they ever consider helping anyone else. What if we’d had our own? What if we could have stopped every bombing?”

A chill ran up Wanda’s spine and almost transferred to Pietro’s. This was not something they hadn’t considered before, what might have happened if an Iron Man or a Thor had cared enough to step in to a tiny little war torn country like theirs and lend an assist. Since New York, Tony Stark’s image had been on the upswing even more so than when he had intervened in Gulmira and closed down his weapons division. Of course, the press had bought that promise hook, line and sinker – those countries didn’t have buildings hollowed out by Stark’s own explosives or graffiti memorials to the lives he had cost. That ‘system of zero accountability’ that he spoke out against after his imprisonment? Stark failed to realize that it didn’t just include him, it was him. Wanda and Pietro never once lost sight of that shell, three feet from their faces as ten year old children, with his name emblazoned across it. As far as they were concerned, he hadn’t paid enough. Not by a long shot.

“What about Sokovia?” Wanda asked, sidling closer cautiously, “What is this going to do for the revolution?”

Istvan looked into Wanda’s eyes and held her gaze for a long moment, and she knew that anything of idealistic Serge was gone. The comrade they knew had been a lie, an act to lure them into security. There was no comfort for how cheated or foolish she and Pietro both felt, both knowing the other shared this shame as Wanda kept her hand steadily on her brother’s arm. Those eyes looked tired with the weight of knowing, burdened by so much secrecy and so much falsehood but the coals of compassion still burned there as he shook his head softly.

“Wanda,” he said gently, “Sokovia is a sinking ship. I love this country, just like you love this country, but the rebellions will fail as long as the weapons manufacturers continue to make their fortunes watching us shoot one another down.”

Wanda’s mouth tightened and she knit her brow, not wanting to hear him but unable to ignore him. She had carried the terror of this reality in her bones for a little while now and had refused to consider the possibility for fear that it meant that her life’s work was somehow invalidated. Everything that she had lost out on or had simply lost needed to mean something, needed to amount to a reasoning that she could point at. _Look at what I’ve done in the wake of this tragedy. Look at what I changed for my people, for myself and my brother._ But there was the seed of bitter truth in Serge’s words – the war she was fighting was valiant but could it ever be won on the streets of the city she loved?

Pietro had long since resigned to the fact that they would likely never see the completion of their life’s work, but as long as it gave himself and Wanda a driving purpose, he had been willing to commit to it wholly despite that likelihood. Still, his urge to protect Wanda’s heart rose up quickly and it was a struggle for him to keep from turning to her and telling her not to listen, that Serge was lying and that she can’t give up, to keep going for him. That would be the lynchpin of the pleading – _do it for me. Keep going for me._ But frankly, he was exhausted and at this point, it was almost a relief to think of it being over, at least until the questions of what the hell they were going to do now began.

Wanda bit her lip and turned to Pietro, burying her face in his shoulder. She thought she might cry, but her insides felt completely dry and drained, her brittle grip on the hem of his shirt trembling a little from residual adrenaline. Pietro wrapped his wiry arm around her shoulders and pulled her against him as he kept his eyes on Istvan all the while.

“We labor under a lie?” Wanda asked into her brother’s collar, turning only slightly to pierce her gaze at Istvan.

He nodded grimly, “Wanda… who do you think kept giving the commune the safehouse locations for the raids? The farms you traded from, the very hotel you all lived in? Government owned. This was always the plan – to reach The Red and Black this way.”

The bottom dropped from both of the twins’ stomachs. It was a set-up the whole time, every part of this story. Pietro might have imagined that the resistance would be ultimately futile, but he had never entertained the thought that it might have been manufactured, that they were playing parts set up for them by some governmental hand. He had believed and believed fully, even when he knew it was a losing battle – there is almost beauty in believing in a losing fight, he always felt.

“Alyosha?” Pietro asked as his voice cracked involuntarily, “…Vanya?”

“Pieces on the chess board, just like the both of you,” he answered, moving the ice pack to rest against his knuckles, “The deaths were not planned, but… it’s a totalitarian regime in the making. There is nothing to breed fearful patriotism like civilians who resist being killed in the street, yeah?”

“Vanya,” Pietro repeated, angrier, “Is this where they are all taken? Are we-“

“You assume we are the only ones who are active and with plans, Pietro. There are so many sects of so many shadows that it might kill you to know just how many. Those who are possibilities are brought here, given the choice. Those who are not brought here? I do not know where they go. I do not work for everyone.”

Rage was the logical reaction to these realizations. Both Wanda and Pietro carried enough hatred in their hearts to fuel them for miles and miles, and being made fools of by the very thing they had been working against should have given them enough to practically lift from the floor and burst through the ceiling. The cresting wave of that rage spread through them both and reached up into their throats, their mouths until, suddenly… nothing. It was as if every piece of momentum, every bit of motivation had been sucked straight from their bodies. Pietro knew he was not alone as he felt Wanda slump against him, and he knew she was defeated. They both were. The final indignity was visited upon them.

“If you choose to stay, if you choose to make your work count for something,” Istvan said quietly, concise as if in sympathy, “And I know how hard you both worked… you will be fed. You will be clothed, and compensated. The program you are working for will help you disappear to safety, and you will become greater than you had ever imagined possible.”

“We want to go,” Wanda answered bitterly, her mouth curling down into a grimace at him as he saw that fire in her eyes dimming, “We want to leave.”

“Then you can leave,” Istvan nodded, gesturing to the open door, “It is a courtesy we don’t always allow, but you can leave. Though I must warn you, Wanda, the commune was raided hours ago. Most of the members got out, but the rest are prisoners of the state for treason.”

Getting up with a soft grunt, he looked pointedly at them both, “And the two of you are wanted for treason as well.”

Now Pietro’s mouth tightened, his arm around Wanda tightening as well. The punishment for treason in Sokovia was excecution, usually carried out swiftly and by hanging or firing squad. Hell, the punishment for dissent was much the same, only on some curb in the city and without the joke that was due process. To hear Istvan tell it, the country they called home was heading the way of Mussolini in a very big hurry – perhaps this was the best life boat by which to escape. He cursed himself for considering the luxury of knowing where meals were coming from with regularity, a lack of worry about the roof over his head; while not hard to understand, these thoughts were betrayals to everything they had built their beliefs on in the last four years. Still, if their beliefs were lies founded upon tricks, then was this not the easiest way out?

But Wanda wanted to leave and there was no part of him that would deny her anything she wanted. Besides, they made all their choices together and any consideration of this offer would need to be discussed elsewhere. Though he still felt weak and tired, he bent to catch Wanda behind the knees, lifting her up into his arms as he went towards the door. She gave him no resistance, nearly weightless in his grip as she leaned her head against his shoulder in sheer exhaustion.

“Just consider it, Pietro, Wanda,” called Istvan’s voice from behind them as they made their way into the hallway, finding it just as modern and unassuming as the room they had been held in until the walls were made of darker stone and suddenly Pietro knew exactly where they were being held, “Just consider it! Otherwise, you had better start running, my friends.”

Pietro scowled to himself and as soon as he saw the doorway, did just that.

***

The figure of the young man running with the girl in his arms began to shrink in size every moment as he darted over debris and rocks, trying desperately to make it down the embankment and away from the building. Through a notch in the stone walls, a man with a rifle set his scope on them and followed the erratic movements, the pauses and hitches as he tried to escape with his sister. These ones were not unlike the others – barely more than kids, looking like they were being starved to death. He had never seen two come in together before, though; that was a new tactic on someone’s part. Still, it clearly hadn’t worked the way they were hoping. Sighing, the man closed one eye and lined up his shot, one gloved finger sliding delicately around the trigger.

There were footsteps behind him but the sniper didn’t flinch, his shot perfectly lined to the back of Pietro’s curly, bleached head.

“Don’t.”

The command came sternly from behind him and the sniper sighed again, turning his rifle to its side and disengaging the scope, “No? Zey’re making an escape.”

“Let them go,” Istvan responded, peering out through the notching at the distant darting figure. There was a sureness in his gaze and tone that seemed odd to the sniper – he had never seen Istvan let anyone who refused the testing go, much less seem so pleased about it.

“Might I inquire as to vy?” the sniper asked, his German accent a sharp contrast to Istvan’s Slavic drawl, “Zey are going to disappear.”

“They will be back, and soon. I’m sure of it.”

Unsatisfied, the sniper grunt and chewed at his cheek, casting another irritated glance into the distance. The figures weren’t even present anymore, lost somewhere in the darkening day and hilly landscape in the forests nearby. Maybe if he had hounds…

“How are you so sure, eh?” he needled, “Zey looked pretty scared to me.”

“Because,” Istvan paused, the tracings of a smirk cornering his mouth, “I just took everything away from them that wasn’t one another.”

The sniper had no fucking idea what he meant by that, but shrugged indifferently and turned back towards the hallway, barely making it a step before he received another order.

“Contact von Strucker. Let him know I have found his miracles.”

Stopping in his tracks, the sniper nodded, responding in the curt tradition of his kinship, “Hail Hydra.”

“Hail Hydra,” Istvan echoed back.

 


	4. Deep Breaths

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “They took everything from us, Pietro,” she nearly whispered, eyes caressing every inch of his face as she felt the stir of arousal, her hand running up his arm to lace their fingers and lock their palms.
> 
> He looked at her lips, her eyes. His breath hitched when her small hand came up to stroke back his errant hair, squeezing the other where she had intertwined them. This was it. A door was opening here that would transport them to a place they could never come back from, no matter what happened. It could irrevocably change them or brand them both for hell if such a thing existed. It would mean that being outcasts was no longer just a choice but the only recourse in a world that would never, ever understand the way they both felt, the way his heart and hers – their heart – were hammering in their chests for only one another.
> 
> Pietro took his free hand and ran his shaking thumb across her lower lip, his voice trembling in betrayal of himself, “…not everything.”
> 
> It was as if the world went still for only a second, both of them on the precipice of this new phase of their life together, waiting with baited breath. For a long moment, nothing happened.
> 
> And then everything happened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here's the moment you've all (or some of you) have been waiting for. Thank you again for the magnificent feedback, I am beyond flattered.
> 
> Might I suggest you put on "Flames" by VAST about halfway down? I played it on a loop while writing the entire last half of this chapter. 
> 
> Enjoy!

That Evening

The hotel that had housed the commune was crawling with police by the time Wanda and Pietro had made their way back into the city on foot. Exhausted, hungry and cold in addition to now being fugitives of the state, the twins huddled together in the darkness of an alley across the way and took in the scene before them: neon police tape barking exclamation pointed orders covered the bashed-in front door, deep red stains and chalk outlines on the sidewalk outside, and the continual pacing of what must have been undercover officers waiting to see if anyone would be dumb enough to return to the scene. Pietro would not allow himself to wonder who had been killed or who had escaped, only focusing on reassuring Wanda that there was nothing inside of that building worth risking their lives over. The only mementos they had foraged from their apartment – her mother’s rings and Pietro’s worn, small picture – never left their persons long enough to be lost anywhere. Wanda glanced down at the two tarnished little sterling bands around one finger as she had grown thin enough that they could fall off without doubling up and gave a small sigh, summoning what little strength she had left to get to her feet.

Their legs feeling like jello and their heads still screaming from having been knocked unconscious, the two stumbled along in the shadows, Pietro’s arm guarding his sister’s shoulders all the while. There was no place to go – any safehouses or hidden rooftop gardens had been seized in the raid if Serge was telling the truth (and it certainly looked as though he was). Neither had money and hadn’t for some time as it served no purpose in their barter system. _Foolish, foolish, foolish little girl_ , Wanda could not help but admonish herself as she tried to ignore the roaring in her empty stomach and the pounding in her temples, _Two poor Sokovian orphans trying to take on the system. How foolish you were. How naïve_.

“Stop that,” Pietro murmured lowly, turning to kiss the side of her head and pull her closer under his arm as they moved onto a sidewalk, keeping as low a profile as possible.

Wanda didn’t respond as they moved to tag along with a bigger crowd of adults making their way past the town square and along a broken chain link fence. This part of town wasn’t unfamiliar to her, just slightly less frequented in the last few years than others – it was the center of the city, the place where some of the heaviest casualties occurred during the first wave of bombings. A grand church still stood at the epicenter, fenced off and away from the public as it had never been restored or re-opened after its partial destruction. Wanda considered that perhaps that was when her country gave up: the moment its faith was literally destroyed by a falling thermobaric weapon, the hand of Tony Stark the American God of War smiting down upon this poor little place and robbing it cleanly of its belief in anything holy.

Their parents had taught them about the Torah and their religious heritage but they were also intellectuals, treating the old faiths with the respect afforded to a beautiful antique but taking it no more seriously than that. It was more like DNA than spiritual belief, the imprinting of generations of Romani and Jewish custom riding around inside of their heads as history, as a lovingly hand-bound book to keep passing down the bloodline. Still, Wanda and Pietro had loved visiting the church on religious holidays, mesmerized by the pomp and circumstance of it all and drawn to ritual the way children so rarely are. Pietro remembered Wanda’s eyes, so cartoonishly big on her head as a child, as she stared up at the murals on the ceiling.

The sun had finally disappeared, the city around them lighting up dimly as they walked as casually as possible, trying to hide any limping or telltale signs that might draw attention to themselves. A gap in the fence was coming up quickly and the sidewalk population was becoming more and more sparse as they continued on. Wanda began to feel nervously exposed, as though she were being watched or followed already by unseen eyes although she had doubts that it was anything but hunger based delirium or fear based paranoia. Moving smoothly and without hesitation, Pietro dipped the two of them under the naked railing and in through the gap, picking up his pace to a slow trot until they were past the overgrown grass, weeds and broken glass and onto the steps of the once great holy house. The doorway was wide open, its ornate doors rotting away as they leaned propped up against the outside of the building, inviting them to step inside of the fallen cathedral. Pietro caught himself holding his breath as they passed the threshold, his eyes darting about the darkness as his mouth fell open slightly.

“Wandika,” he murmured the nickname he so rarely used, nodding forward, “Look.”

Ivy had begun to crawl through the cracks in the floor and walls, but the central throne for the leader stood untouched. The raised concrete around it created a sort of dais, elevating it slightly and thusly one would imagine making it more of a target for the falling slabs of ceiling or flying chunks of destroyed stone columns ; and yet, it stood as if untouched, as if defiant in the face of the dilapidation of the rest of the church. Its ornate arms were carved so intricately it looked nearly impossible, the inlaid metal and rich wood dirty with soot and time but proud of structure. Something inside of Wanda’s heart leapt to see this, though it seemed foolish to bestow so much meaning on an inanimate object and what had to be sheer coincidence. Still, as the twins stood before it in almost reverent silence, both of them noted the perfect metaphor for their lives: even amidst utter defeat and destruction, the chair refused to fall.

Minutes passed before Wanda began to feel lightheaded, realizing her knees were locked and she was likely to pass out if she didn’t have a seat. She had hardly swooned when Pietro noticed immediately, anchoring her into his arms and moving to sit her on the floor facing the throne. Two standing columns kept a perfect alcove in this spot, a hiding place that would not be seen from the sidewalk and could keep them hidden until morning. They would need supplies, but Wanda was in no shape to keep going – not that Pietro was doing great himself. Still, he would be damned before he saw his sister freeze or starve to death inside of this church tonight after everything they had already been through. Crouching, he moved a few strands of her dirty hair away from her face.

“Do not fight me,” he cautioned with a voice as soft and gentle as his fingertips against her forehead, “ I am going to find us food and a blanket. You are going to stay here and stake out our place, yes?”

Wanda’s eyes focused on him in the half dark, mouth opening but unspeaking as if she lacked even the gumption of an argument, only croaking out his name after a long moment, “ _Pietro_ …”

“You feel better after you eat, little sister. I will make sure you do.”

He dipped his face down to hers, kissing her forehead firmly before resting his head against her hair and putting his arms around her. One of her thin hands weakly stroked at his bicep, tears finally beginning to form in her eyes as she stared off at the throne ahead of them. There were a thousand questions in her weary mind – _Where will we go? What do we do? How will we survive now, Pietro, with nothing left to believe in?_ – but none of the strength to even pretend she could vocalize them, much less fight him about where he was going. There was only one thing she could force herself to say as her frail fingers dragged down his skin and her tears finally spilled, streaking down her cheeks.

“Come back to me. You have to.”

“I will,” he breathed back, bending to kiss the side of her face, “I always will.”

With that, he let go of his sister and stood, trotting cautiously to the archway and waiting until he knew he could cleanly slip back out onto the street.

Pietro had always been quick on his feet. Within the space of an hour, he managed to pickpocket a few notes from a man in the square as well as lift a few things in the market - namely some hard cheese, jerky of some sort and bottled water as well as something special for Wanda – before taking a trip to the bathroom and washing his dirty face and hands. The water ran nearly brown with dirt and old blood and he stared down into the sink as it swirled into the drain, wondering exactly what in the hell it was they were supposed to do next if not accept the offer handed to them. The young man that stared back at him in the mirror through bloodshot blue eyes seemed somehow foreign, a ship without anchor, and he chewed his lower lip between his teeth and stared at himself for another long moment before a flushing toilet put him back on edge. _Time to go. Wanda is waiting_.

Snagging a plastic bag from the cashier with well-practiced sleight of hand, he made his casual escape and walked around to the back of the building, his cold hands shoved down into his pockets as he whistled idly. While dumpster diving had always made him feel disgusting, he was pleased to discover a bag of bruised apples and some day-old bread from the bakery wrapped in napkins at the top of one of the cans. Still, this public trip was a dumbly brazen move considering that their faces were well known and he could have been noticed by any number of people. However, Pietro was counting on it being so stupid a plan that no one would dare assume he would be that idiotic – a perfect way to hide in plain sight. The money had seemed strange in his hands, as thin as onion skins and faded with age, but while he could have easily leaned on his skills to nab food, a blanket or jackets would prove to be more difficult. Cursing himself for not thinking to get the blanket first so the food wouldn’t have to wait as long, he passed to the side of the square housing home wares and clothing markets and slowed to get a gander at the lineup, grabbing the first warm, woolen thing he could casually walk away with and setting off on the short trek back.

When Wanda opened her eyes again she was startled by the sound of approaching footsteps and scrambled back into the dark alcove, trying her best to remain hidden. Guards had never really been known to patrol the area, but she couldn’t discount the possibility that in light of the riot, they might have taken it up. Still, it only took Pietro a moment to find her again and crouch down with a weary smile, the blanket thrown over his shoulder. She exhaled a breath she didn’t even realize she was holding, rewarding him with a small smile of relief as she sat up on wobbling arms.

“I told you,” he teased gently, coming to sit beside her and open the bag to produce one tube of dark red lipstick that he held up with a smile, “I always come back.”

Wanda almost smiled back.

***

Despite the cold, Wanda poured some water onto a napkin and wiped her face as clean as she could with no soap before applying her new lipstick as well as she could with no mirror. Pietro watched her silently, his eyes soft in the partial light as he studied the shape of her lips and the curvature of her cheekbones and jaw with renewed appreciation. They could have died today, both in the riot and the castle they had been held at, and the fact wasn’t lost on either one of them. Cutting her eyes over at him, she finally cracked what almost passed for a real smile. Sure, her entire world had been destroyed – again – and they had no home – again, again – but in so long as her brother was beside her, she knew they would figure it out, one way or another. Besides, despair was something she wore like her makeup these days – moving through her life (or whatever passed for her life) without it would have felt completely wrong.

Though they were still far from great and even further from safe, at least they were no longer hungry. The temptation to eat through all the supplies had been great but both Pietro and Wanda knew there might not be much in the coming days and that further trips into the square would be twice as ill-advised as the first one. Nonetheless, Pietro couldn’t resist giving his sister one more apple as they settled into the blanket to huddle together for warmth. Though the concrete was hardly a comfortable bed, nothing soothed their aching bones like the heat from being close together, Wanda moving into the crook of his arm and burying her face against his shoulder. Through the cracks in the ceiling, Pietro could clearly see a few stars dotting the night sky, a welcome sight considering how quickly things might have gone sideways today. Wanda’s voice came muffled from his shirt, the hot puff of her breath pleasant against his skin.

“I do not know what it is we’re supposed to be doing now, Pietro.”

“Sleeping, probably,” he responded softly, hand brushing her shoulder idly.

“You know what I mean.”

Pietro bit his lip. There had been such precious little time not spent running and hiding to consider the offer posed unto them at the castle, and now it was all he could think about. There might have been no saving anything or anyone – he was in no way naïve enough to believe that was their mission anyway – but there was such a grand chance for revenge, for retribution that he couldn’t help but entertain the possibility. Further sweetening the pot was the offer of consistent housing, amnesty from their supposed crimes, and of course, food. He felt ashamed of being manipulated by such a simple need, but as he had watched Wanda devour an overripe apple, all he could think of was how much she deserved better, how horribly he wanted to give her everything in the world.

“…very few choices, Wanda.”

She was quiet for a long moment, turning to rest her chin against his chest, which was uncomfortable for him but he made no moves to inform her.

“They lie about why they want us. They could be lying about everything.”

“I don’t believe he was lying about this,” Pietro countered gently, tilting his face down to look at her as best he could from the given angle, “They seek volunteers because the program is illegal. Top secret, most likely. We could finally be a part of something that actually makes the difference we talk about, yeah?”

Unconvinced, Wanda gazed off into the middle distance of the dark, “There is nothing left to fight for. Sokovia is lost to history and war. You and I have nowhere to go.”

He paused, second guessing himself for only a moment before he saw his sister look back at him, and he knew they were sharing the same thought.

“There is revenge, Wanda. We join, we become our own avengers. Avenge what has been done unto us.”

Pressing her dark lips together into a thin line, she stared back, “You know they lie to us. No one who experiments on humans has good intentions in their heart.”

“Unless we are talking about you…” Pietro reached down and cupped her face in his hand, tracing a thumb affectionately across her cheekbone, “…I am not sure if I any longer have good intentions in mine.”

Closing her eyes, she tilted her face into his hand, the roughness of his callouses a welcome familiarity. There had been nights like this in the past, where the air felt thick around them with possibility that had no name or at least no name that they were willing to give to it and they had both spent hours pretending they didn’t know exactly what the other was thinking. To be fair, Wanda still wasn’t entirely sure what she was thinking, except that their almost-deaths had opened but one road ahead of them and that now, in this church with a cracked ceiling and a slivered view of the sky, there was truly nothing left to lose. To hell with morality, lofty ideals. To hell with anyone who dared tell her she couldn’t have the one thing that kept her breathing.

All the choices she was making seemed oddly clear now, including this one.

Pietro worried his chapped lower lip between his teeth as he watched his sister’s big eyes glitter in the dark. He didn’t have to ask what she was doing, what exactly she was thinking when she turned her face to his palm and kissed the rough skin with lingering lips. Something shifted inside of him, stirring low but striking all the chords he knew so well to be arousal. It never did take much for him, but this was unprecedented for a number of reasons – reasons he chose to ignore. He was in no state to pretend like this was the first time his cock had stiffened in his pants as he lay pressed against her.

Emboldened by the clarity of their ultimate doom, Wanda moved onto her elbow and up over him, her hair hanging limp around them like a curtain. There was a brief moment where they both paused, eyeing one another with the same desperation and determination that they had shared since Tony Stark destroyed their entire world with an errant bombshell. Pietro realized his breath was coming harder, his mouth slightly slack as he stared up at her with only the thought of how ungodly, how utterly beautiful she was, that this had been what he waited for and he would gladly wait again for another seventeen years for either of them to move if it meant he got to look at her like this.

They probably didn’t have another seventeen years. They both knew this without speaking it.

“They took everything from us, Pietro,” she nearly whispered, eyes caressing every inch of his face as she felt the stir of arousal, her hand running up his arm to lace their fingers and lock their palms.

He looked at her lips, her eyes. His breath hitched when her small hand came up to stroke back his errant hair, squeezing the other where she had intertwined them. This was it. A door was opening here that would transport them to a place they could never come back from, no matter what happened. It could irrevocably change them or brand them both for hell if such a thing existed. It would mean that being outcasts was no longer just a choice but the only recourse in a world that would never, ever understand the way they both felt, the way his heart and hers – their heart – were hammering in their chests for only one another.

Pietro took his free hand and ran his shaking thumb across her lower lip, his voice trembling in betrayal of himself, “…not everything.”

It was as if the world went still for only a second, both of them on the precipice of this new phase of their life together, waiting with baited breath.  For a long moment, nothing happened.

And then everything happened.

Among the many thoughts they shared without words was that, if they could both wish for anything in this world, it would be the ability to remember every detail about that night in exacting clarity for the rest of their lives. Instead, as all memories do, it blurred at the edges with adrenaline and excitement and want, only tinged with the interlocking of their mutual despair. This could be the beginning of the end. The world was on fire. There was no escape except this, except each other.

What Pietro remembered distinctly was how she still tasted like apples and how when she bent to kiss him that first time, _really_ kiss him, he swore he felt his knees go weak, even in a prone position. It was just as a thousand times before and yet like nothing that had ever happened, and when she didn’t pull away after one chaste moment, he lifted his head from the jacket wadded beneath it and kissed her back so tenderly, so slowly that he was trembling by the time he reclined back down. She came with him, both hands moving to trace slender fingers along his cheeks as she tilted her head and deepened it, opening her mouth to him.

What Wanda remembered distinctly was how, unlike how she had always imagined, she wasn’t spending the entire experience clocking the blow-by-blow in her own head. She tended to be so locked into her own mind that she figured when this eventually happened – and she never did specify with whom to herself – she would be too busy running internal commentary or trying to piece together exactly how she felt about it to actually be present in the moment and enjoy it. On the contrary – she was so swept up in all these brand new sensations and the throb of her heart pulsing right between her legs that she couldn’t think of anything else but _yes_.  His tongue was softer than she might have imagined, his moans against her mouth sending chills down her spine that could have knocked her chipped nail polish off.

For the briefest moment of what had to be one of the greatest horrors of Pietro’s life, he felt his confidence waiver just enough to make him question if he was going to be able to perform. The night he first had sex he was so nervous that it had taken an uncoordinated handjob on Vanya’s part to get him hard enough to go. Despite how easily he felt aroused by the flirtations he undertook back at the commune, there was a gravity to this situation that made him falter, if only for a moment. This was Wanda. There was nothing in the world less than perfection that he would accept for her, and yet here they were in this broken down palace of a church with nothing to their names and no hope, no future except the one they had in each other. The pressure had never been greater.

Then, she moaned a soft noise into his mouth and a shot of new arousal went stabbing down his spine so hard it almost _hurt_. There would be no such problems tonight.

Though he was hardly a hearty young man, it didn’t take much for him to sit up enough to move Wanda onto her back. Their pulses raced as she peered up at him, somehow doubly innocent in this moment with her flushed face and smeared lipstick as she reached up to trace her fingertips over his mouth. There were so many things the both of them wanted out of this – namely, to be able to take their time, explore one another soundly, exhaust every bit of want from the both of them until their intimate knowledge of one another ran all the way to the bone. Yet circumstance didn’t permit for much more than this, and it made Pietro angry to think about the things that Wanda deserved that he couldn’t give her. The hem of her shirt rode up over her stomach and he slid his hand underneath it, against the concave of her belly and almost halting over the jutting of her ribs.

He could feel them. Every single one, clearly beneath the skin.

Something in his face must have given him away, or perhaps it was the uncanny ability to read one another, because Wanda’s face fell in the partial light and he watched as the glint of tears filled her eyes. She felt beyond ashamed of her inadequacy, that she wasn’t as beautiful as she felt he deserved or that she would somehow be a disappointment with her lack of knowledge here. Maybe if she had been a ‘normal’ girl, spent more time daydreaming about these kinds of things or experimenting with boys, maybe if she could have just done something differently there might have been enough to eat to give her hips and breasts and she could be everything she knew he wanted.

“No,” he exhaled, shaking his head, addressing her fears without her having said a word as he brought his face into the crook of her neck and kissed marks into her skin, nuzzling into her ear to whisper, “You are beautiful. There is nothing more beautiful in this world than you. There has never been a thing more precious to me, exactly as you are.”

Wanda’s self-loathing might have encouraged her to disregard this as the sweet talk of a boy trying to get laid, but this wasn’t just some boy – it was Pietro. And Pietro did not lie to her. Ever.

“I would burn cities, raze them all to the ground for you,” he continued, settling between her legs and nearly gasping at the contact of the heat of her core through his pants, “There is nothing on this earth I would not do for you, just because you will it so.”

The moment he pressed against her, the heavy lead of guilt and shame in Wanda’s stomach evaporated into nothingness as though it had never been there at all. Biological trick or a sign from the fates that this was supposed to happen she wasn’t sure, but she was in no way going to question it when she felt it so strongly. One hand stroked up the back of his t-shirt, palm flat against the lean muscles there as she felt them shift when he moved, her eyes closing as his voice in her ear sent chills directly into her cunt until she had no doubt that she was ready for this.

Though lacking the steady confidence of a seasoned man, Pietro’s fingers searched upwards over her ribs, ghosting beneath the fabric of her shirt and to the soft flesh of her small breasts to knead gently. The noises that escaped her lips sent another round of shivers through him and that coupled with the way her hips canted up into his made him acutely aware that there wasn’t going to be a lot of time for him. Wetting his lips as he peered down at her intently, he paused, his breath caught in his throat before he managed to get the words he was intending out of his mouth.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” came the reply so quickly that she felt she needed to repeat it, swallowing hard, “Yes. Only you.”

The intimacy of this moved him in a way he knew he had no right to be, considering that he had hardly waited to pay her the same honor. Still, there was no malice in her voice or in her eyes as she reached up, tangled her fingers in his hair and tugged him down into a deep, slow kiss, growing brazen in her arousal. Anxiety blossomed in his chest for the second time as he considered the logistics, how quiet they would have to be for their own safety’s sake, how unwise it was to have unprotected sex with anyone let alone his sister. Mainly, though, he worried that this might somehow turn the unworldly magic of this moment into a painful, hard memory for her.

He kept his nose nuzzled to hers as he broke the kiss, panting softly against her lips, “…it will hurt.”

“Everything hurts,” she responded succinctly, moving to kiss his throat with ferocity, “I can handle this.”

Without the luxury of a door or a lock, a bed or the time and comfort to spend, it was hardly the deflowering he might have hoped for her. There was the fumbling of his fingers through her pubic hair, between her lips as he insured that she was wet enough to ease the initial discomfort, her little gasps making him crazy even as he had to shush her quietly. He pulled her thick winter tights down to where her boots stopped, her skirt riding up around her waist and the blanket precariously pulled up over his back to maintain the sudden flush of warmth they were both grateful for. Wanda panted softly as Pietro unsheathed himself from his pants and pressed the blunt head of his cock against her.

“Yes,” she rasped again, reaching up to touch his face before her hands sought his.

Flames licked up his spine and ignited through her hips as he pressed in with what little give was there, the contorting of her face as she bit her lips a reminder to him to be unwaiveringly gentle. He stilled when he met resistance, her wet cunt unforgivingly tight around him as his cock practically threatened to end the party immediately if he wasn’t careful. It took a little time spent pushing in by degrees and withdrawing the same to get any headway made, Pietro’s eyes carefully on Wanda’s face for any signs that he had to stop as he whispered softly to her of how much he loved her, how all she had to do was say the word and he would stop, how he loved her no matter what.

Wanda took deeper breaths instead of shallow ones, trying to sort out which sensations were pleasure and which were discomfort. The first time was almost always uncomfortable – she knew that much from books and the few conversations about sex she had with her mother that were a little too age appropriate to give her much to go on right now. Still, watching Pietro’s face shift between concern and bliss made her heart flutter in her chest and eventually, he pushed past the barrier of her hymen and then the sensations were blinding, strange and wonderful and still somewhat painful yet somehow not. Pietro had worried that it would be an uphill battle not to rut into her mindlessly until he came, but this was different – even with his limited experiences, he knew something about this was deeply different. The connection was intense beyond words, his hand leaving her hip to seek her hand and lace them. The sharpness of her jutting hipbones pressed into him but he barely regarded it, his back arching as he bent to kiss her, keeping the steady and slow pace he began with as the sensations threatened to blind him and rob him of all his breath.

Wanda didn’t expect to come – frankly, Pietro didn’t expect Wanda to come either as he wasn’t sure Vanya did and wasn’t going to flatter himself into assuming he could accidentally make it happen – but she did, the drag of his pubic bone against her clit bringing her into an agonizingly slow orgasm. Somehow, she still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened, what that blissful thing that still had her pulsating was until she felt Pietro seize up, pressing deep into her to come. She closed her eyes, pressing the side of her face to his and listened to the absolute music that was his stifled moan and gasp, the trembling exhales in time with the pulsing of him inside of her. Perhaps the most intense aspect of this was how their chests were pressed together so that the pounding of their hearts nearly echoed into one another in perfect rhythm, the reminder she needed tonight that no matter what happened from here, he was going to be everything that she needed.

Once he caught his breath, he kissed her like the world was ending, no words needed beyond that, and slept more soundly on this concrete floor than he had on the mattress in a long, long time.

***

Two days passed and Istvan was beginning to get nervous. Perhaps his hubris had been misplaced and the twins had high tailed it for whatever patch of freedom they thought they could achieve. Perhaps the Sokovian government – the one he’d had next to nothing to do with despite his claims – had nabbed them, made them dig one shared grave and shot them both into it.

Either way, he was sure he would be next if Baron von Strucker decided he had been patient enough in waiting.

He was smoking a cigarette and cleaning a gun when the sniper appeared, leaning in the doorway.

“Well, I suppose I owe you. You vill never guess who is at ze door, asking about ze program.”

 


	5. Salted Wounds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first year in the program was by and large the hardest. 
> 
> When Wanda and Pietro had appeared on the doorstep of the castle having maneuvered past any traps or pratfalls to declare their interest, they were hollow-cheeked and motivated heavily by a lack of any other choice. Istvan could finally relax upon delivering the news to Baron von Strucker, who sent orders for preliminary tests to be sent straight to him. This was uncommon given how many volunteers (and ‘volunteers’) had passed through the program, living and dying under the roof of the castle without much more than a few cursory glances from the Baron. Istvan chalked it up to the Nazi-era interest that Mengele had shown in testing on twins – it was widely believed in Nazi science circles that two people who drew strength from one another would make much more hearty candidates than one person drawing solely upon themselves. Whatever the case, von Strucker always kept a monocle’d eye on the Maximoff twins with a pointed interest – though he did not meet them in person until several months in to their tenure at the compound. 
> 
> It was apparent from the word go that they were Hydra’s great white hope.

The testing itself did not start off as rigorous as it would eventually become. Basic blood panels and assessments, establishing of a medical profile, an exacting write up of things that would need to be monitored and things to be avoided during the coming months of build up to the grand finale – Wanda and Pietro went through being poked, prodded, examined and questioned before they even began to hear about the actual process of application itself. Those initial few months were a time of great change for the twins in numerous ways, primarily in that it was the first time in their lives that they had consistent access to a regular meal schedule, hot showers, and beds that may not have been five-star standard but were clean and sterile. Furthermore, in a move that quelled a lot of their lingering fears about what was to come, they were not separated and were allowed to sleep in the same room. Being solely inside of the castle compound had worn on both of them given how used they were to living without leashes and being free to make their own plans at will, but that autonomy had been the first thing they were informed that they would be signing over.  Wanda had reached down to lay her hand across her brother’s, which lay across her thigh, and gave it a soft squeeze before she put pen to paper and quite literally signed her life away before handing him the instruments to do the same.

They shared a room with bunk beds for that initial testing period on a private wing that had once been the prison. Others would come and go, often only housed in that primary wing for days at a time before being shuffled off to other parts for testing; the twins rarely ever interacted with anyone but one another and the medical team. Istvan explained that when the program first began, the volunteers were encouraged to be social with one another; however, when the actual experimentations began and suddenly participants were dropping like flies, they noticed that the sudden plummet in morale seemed to be killing them just as quickly as the testing itself. There were the ones who never came back, either lost to the testing or moved to other programs as it was explained to the twins by the medical staff, who for the most part seemed a lot less callously disinterested in them than the other subjects. One scientist, a tall woman with striking pale skin and jet black hair, seemed to take more of the initiative to handle Wanda than any of the others. She didn’t talk often and when she did, her Scottish brogue made her difficult for the native Sokovian to understand; she also wore no nametag and never made an attempt to introduce herself. Still, something about the woman’s amber eyes and calm, still hands appealed to Wanda and she found herself drawn to her without real explanation – to the point where eventually the other doctors gave her Wanda’s rounds without question.

Pietro had given enough bluster ego to remind the strangers that were touching him that it was a privilege and not a right, even though everyone knew it was fear talking. Wanda didn’t attempt to talk him down either, letting him keep his pride no matter how thin the sticks propping it up had become. It became a routine that almost brought normalcy: wake up, be weighed, give urine samples, eat breakfast, take a nap, finger-prick hemoglobin testing, take a walk around the wing, eat lunch, give blood, take another nap or just lie together for a while, exercise, shower, eat dinner, read the supplied books or tinker with some incredibly frustrating puzzles, go to bed, try to have sex as quietly as possible within the half an hour between the nurses’ rounds, and then pass out to sleep a sort of pitch-black, secure sleep that they hadn’t known in quite some time. It was hard to call it happiness – their backs against a wall had been the precursory factor that put them into this program and it was hard to go from stray-cat freedom to being a test subject with any amount of joy – but it did bring some certainty to their days, which was something the two of them hadn’t had in a very, very long time.

Wanda was anemic when they had arrived and was diagnosed with anorexia – not anorexia nervosa, as it was born from a routine-based lack of desire to eat more so than a body image conflict – stemming from a possible systemic infection. Pietro had a raging urinary tract infection (“like pissing razorblades” in his eloquent description) and was beginning to develop a stomach ulcer. Both of them were iron deficient, running light fevers, and dehydrated to the point that they were immediately given IV fluids. The first few weeks were nothing but antibiotics and lightning rounds of samples and examinations as the medical team worked to ensure that the twins were at least coming to a safe point to begin working on gaining weight and exercising; Pietro could not aptly put into words what it did for his heart to watch the sallowness in Wanda’s skin disappear, her eyes brighten again as she seemed more alert and less exhausted than he had seen her in recent memory. In fact, neither of them had slept so soundly since before their parents died.

The food was another adjustment. They had lived off of the meager, home-grown shared portions of vegetables and eggs and fruits that were part and parcel of the commune’s barter system. There was never enough for either of them to become anything more than slightly less hungry to the point where Wanda had become a professional at ignoring her hunger altogether. Pietro, who ran a high metabolism well before any experimentation, constantly nibbled at something or the other to stave off a constant hunger. But here in the facility, there was no mincing of portions or mindfulness towards sharing – they were given their own bowls and trays half-filled with vegetables and meat and cheeses and breads. They were standardly simple spreads, but to the twins it looked borderline opulent. Wanda opined that there were still political prisoners and commune members somewhere out there in the city starving while they ate like kings, but Pietro encouraged her to eat, reminding her that this might not last forever. Still, neither of them could have imagined at the time that what they were eating wasn’t even half the recommended daily caloric intake for people their ages and sizes - the nutritional scientists present knew that it was unwise to just start gorging someone that unhealthily thin until their systems had time to adapt.

While they hardly had the privacy to continue their newly minted sexual relationship, they were still teenagers and getting creative with what little time was afforded to them wasn’t too big a feat (unless they were simply too tired, which did occasionally occur). So many of the things that Pietro was dying to do were still logistically tricky but it didn’t stop him from whispering them to her in the dead of night, his lips against her ear or the back of her neck just like old times as she heaved soft sighs, her back pressed against his chest. If they were covert enough, sex could pass for spooning or cuddling when the nurses passed by, shining muted lights into the room to ensure no one had gone awol. Somehow, the thrill of possibly being caught and the shame of just how forbidden the act was became part of the appeal for Wanda. They might have still been in the junior league of sexual experience or knowledge but she took great comfort in the fact that Pietro now had a claim on her no one else ever had and no one else ever would.

 _I love you_ , came his whispers night after night as he trailed his hands up her stomach to her breasts and wound a hand reverently in her clean hair, _You know that, don’t you? You know what you do to me, you know what you’ve always done to me. You know that everything I am is yours._

Wanda remained a more passive recipient at first, not out of lack of curiosity or desire but for the sheer overwhelming amount of new information that was always passing at her: the way a tilt of his hips in a certain direction could make her toes curl or how when he had gently urged her onto her back one night and put his mouth between her legs, she had almost summoned the nurses with her struggles to keep herself quiet. Kissing Pietro made her lightheaded, her heart leaping like the fish in her hands in that stream when she was a child. Sensation, emotion would pass between them without a single word spoken of it and all they had to do was look into one another’s eyes, press their mouths together to confirm that it was shared down to the blood in their veins. Little touches that had once been intimate only in how quietly they were shared lit her up from the inside like fireworks. Watching the glassiness of his eyes fade over the course of weeks to be replaced by a sort of clearness she hadn’t seen in them in years made her want to weep out of joy. Even if nothing else about this had been worth it – even if they both eventually died in here – Wanda reasoned with herself that it would be well worth it just to see Pietro become healthy again.

The impatience was the worst part. There were going to be radical experiments that had cost many other volunteers their lives and that promised excruciating physical pain and mental anguish. Istvan had not held back when he explained to them that though they would be treated well by the scientists and doctors, the enhancement application testing itself was nearly paramount to torture. They would indeed have time to back out if they changed their minds – or so it said on paper, neither twin actually believed it for a second – but they had a mandatory wait period while the staff worked on getting them back to peak physical condition so that their chances of survival would be even greater. This raised the twins’ attentions even further as they noticed that the others in their wing were hardly paid the same courtesy, often still looking sickly when they were moved out. They both knew without so much as a word that someone in a high place apparently had very much faith in them.

Once the test results had been satisfactory for a number of weeks, the food that they were given changed drastically – Pietro was given double amounts of meat, both of them increasing their caloric intake by degrees until one night, curled together in bed after about seven minutes of stealthy but vigorous fucking, Wanda glided her palms up her brother’s sweaty back to realize that she couldn’t make out his spine or his ribs anymore. Likewise, Wanda began to fill out in the ways she had never had the extra adipose tissue to do. While their room lacked a mirror, she would lie awake after Pietro had passed out beside her and run her hands down her torso, against her breasts to find that they were almost enough to grab with full hands and down to her hips and thighs to savor how soft they felt. She felt deliciously heavy and corporeal, like she was finally anchored into her own body. Though her frame was still slight, she was suddenly curvaceous in ways that had seemed like they would never happen. Even Wanda’s chosen scientist – Dr. Ballato, she eventually learned – cracked a small smile when she undressed to climb into a shower after her routine physical examination.

When Wanda washed herself in that shower, she noticed her breasts becoming increasingly sensitive to touch. Though she was loathe to complain, she had mentioned to the medical staff that she was experiencing some abdominal pain and was given a laxative and some light painkillers, neither of which she took in favor of allowing her brother to rub her stomach lightly until she could fall asleep. When they woke the next morning, it was in a puddle of blood – the first period she’d had in years. Pietro screamed out for a nurse in horror as he sat up on his knees, quickly trying to check Wanda for possible injuries as their hearts hammered in panic.

Somewhere along the line, they had forgotten that was normal. Wanda had even forgotten what pre-menstrual symptoms felt like, having been too thin to menstruate for the better part of five years. She was unpleasantly reminded of the agony she hadn’t exactly missed but somehow, she felt better knowing that her body had finally returned to full functionality.

One night after she had pulled on the standard issue off-white scrub pants and top that they wore day in and day out, she turned to look at her brother where he sat on the edge of the bed. His hands – so much larger than she had even realized until that moment – were clasped over his mouth as he stared at her with something like reverence, something akin to worship and when she stepped toward him to run her hands over his rapidly growing hair, she realized that he was crying. She didn’t have to ask if something was wrong: she looked into his eyes and saw the relief. The gratitude. As soon as the lights went out, the clothes came back off and she climbed onto him to ride him slowly, her still slender hands reaching up to grab onto the bars of the top bunk for leverage. He watched her with the dumbest, most endearing look on his face as he skimmed his hands up her body to knead gently at her breasts as if he could hardly believe she was real. They could see one another smiling in the dark.

Pietro began lifting weights as part of his daily routine. At first, he could barely run the expected cardio distance much less go on to deadlift anything heavier than standard kettle bell for any length of time, but after a few weeks it suddenly became less and less difficult to bench press the basic weights. The way his lean muscle thickened and defined encouraged him, his pecs and arms growing larger as his abs became more cut, the deep v of his hips distracting Wanda from her own less intensive workouts every time he pulled up his shirt to wipe his face. The bleached parts of his hair had grown out considerably and eventually, he asked a doctor if they could get the scissors and trim them away. When Wanda returned to the room that night after a visit to Dr. Ballato to discuss her progress, she found Pietro standing there with a head full of trimmed dark waves, a smattering of dark stubble across his jaw and his arms straining against the fabric of his now too-small shirt.

The next day, Pietro’s doctor eyed the scratches on his back with mild concern. He shrugged, muttering something about Wanda having nightmares before he began his daily pull-up routine.

Dr. Ballato had kept the unreadable but calm expression that was the daily set of her face as she discovered the bruises that were sucked into Wanda’s skin while taking her pulse the next morning. Having not even thought about the possibility of being caught this way, Wanda didn’t register that something was wrong until she glanced up and saw Dr. Ballato’s amber eyes scanning her, her lips pursed in the way they always did when she was running internal dialogue. Her own face fell as she stared up at the doctor, ice-cold fear wedging into her stomach. This would be the end of it. They would separate them, admonish them, maybe even kill them – and at this point, death would be welcome over separation. The doctor reached out and swept back Wanda’s hair with a clinical but gentle touch, tilting her head to look at the marks.

“I…” Wanda tried to begin, her mouth hanging open as she cursed herself for not coming up with a decent lie on the spot, her heart practically in her throat.

“Wanda,” Dr. Ballato asked evenly, slowing down so her accent was less hard for the girl to decipher, “…are you sexually active?”

Wanda closed her mouth. The fear in her wide eyes dammed up with defensiveness. There was no way in hell she was going to escape this moment unscathed and she made the snap decision that she was not above begging to keep herself and her brother together and safe, swallowing and trying to put together something cogent, a plea that might move the woman in front of her.

“Wanda,” the doctor repeated, setting down her clipboard and leaning forward just enough that she could hold her gaze on an even level, “I’m not here to judge you. I just need to know, for medical purposes.”

The street-smart, tougher Wanda emerged for a moment and she straightened her posture, deciding to face this a little more head on than she originally planned, “…yes. Will this be a problem?”

Without missing a beat, Dr. Ballato gave her a small half-smile and picked up her clipboard, “Not at all, but we need to talk about birth control.”

There was a pause as Wanda tried to deduce if this was some sort of trick. She liked the doctor, sure, but if she had learned anything by the twist of events that led her into this compound, there was no point in implicitly trusting anyone who wasn’t Pietro. Serge, simple son of a farmer with an interest in passive resistance as political statement, turned out to be Istvan, manager of some clandestine branch of an unknown organization that was going to turn them into super-humans or make sure that they died trying. Despite this, Istvan-Not-Serge remained one of their most steadfast encouragers – every time they spoke he was mindful to include the reminder that he was absolutely certain they would be the ones, that they were going to change the world. Dr. Ballato sighed and tapped her pen against the clipboard.

“We’re going to be putting you through illegal, unethical human experimentation to create a new breed of super soldier that might be able to obtain godlike powers,” she said dryly, raising one well groomed eyebrow at the young woman before her, “I chose to check my ideas about right and wrong at the door. My colleagues did as well.”

Wanda chewed her lip. She had been without makeup for a good week now, her last lipstick that Pietro jacked from the local corner store worn down to a useless nub that she dug her pinkie finger into to try to obtain the last bit of carmine wax. She felt naked without it but somehow it was less imposing than before – perhaps now she was learning to feel fierce in any incarnation of herself. She didn’t want anyone else to know about them but figured that it might be too late to put the genie back in the metaphorical bottle at this point, so she settled for wearing this like armor as well, not replying to the doctor’s assurances and instead continuing on as if nothing had happened.

When she told Pietro, he frowned but said nothing, putting his arm around Wanda and pulling her in closer beneath the starched sheet.

***

At the next medical staff meeting, Baron von Strucker cleared out anyone who wasn’t working specifically for the twins to ask for updates. One of Ballato’s colleagues ran down the list of improved statistics, making remark to how physically fit Pietro was becoming and how Wanda’s stamina had greatly improved but that perhaps it was time to move on to guided meditation for the sister considering that what she was slated for required far better mental discipline than physical. Ballato waited until nearly everyone else had left the room before she spoke up, regretting every part of this action but knowing its necessity.

“Sir,” she started evenly, her professional manner never belying the fact that she was in fact at least a little intimidated by him, “I would like to start the sister on a progesterone-only birth control as an injection. Depo-Provera would be my first good choice.”

Dr. Avignoine, a slight ginger who had become chiefly responsible for the bulk of Pietro’s medical care, turned his attention to her with mild alarm. Von Strucker raised the eyebrow above his monocle as he regarded her with some interest and glanced from doctor to doctor coolly, as if expecting some greater explanation, “Is there something I need to be aware of occurring? You’re familiar that there is to be no sexual contact between the staff and the volunteers.”

“I know that, sir. There hasn’t been.”

Von Strucker paused for a long moment, the lightbulb above his head going on ever so subtly, the realization nothing but a ghost of an expression passing over his standardly bland features. They exchanged a stare that spoke volumes before he laughed lightly, the noise like dry air passing through a hollow gourd, and toyed with the paperweight on his desk.

“How interesting.”

Avignoine furrowed his brow, two doctorates and an internship to France’s top medical school still not enough to give him what he needed to piece this one together immediately, and looked at his boss and constituent, “I don’t understand, has she indicated that she is sexually active?”

“Yes,” Ballato responded succinctly, cutting her eyes at him in a manner of trying to give him the insinuation he needed so the line of questioning could stop.

“If she’s not having sexual contact with the staff, it can’t be the other candidates, Sir,” he explained, trying to cover his own ass until the realization hit him halfway through his sentence, “There is no one left in initial holding and we’ve cleared o-… oh. Oh.”

Von Strucker almost laughed again, an amused smirk on his thin mouth as he rolled the glass orb from his desk between his palms, “This is not uncommon, Doctor. At least not as uncommon as you may think. Offer her sterilization, if she is so inclined.”

Avignoine struggled to find an appropriate response while Ballato nodded, excused herself and took her medication requisition form to the pharmaceutical workers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You will notice that I’ve opted to depict the twins’ time in the Hydra compound a little differently than it’s usually handled. 
> 
> When we first saw Wanda and Pietro at the end of TWS, they very much so looked like prisoners – Pietro flailing around inside his room, Wanda seeming dazed and preoccupied with the blocks. I figured “volunteer” was facetious as it appeared that they were both being held against their wills. However, AoU had them free and loose in the castle during the Avengers siege, and while neither of them seemed particularly crestfallen over Baron von Strucker’s death, they didn’t seem happy about it either – more so alarmed. 
> 
> I didn’t see any real indication that their stay would have been intentionally torturous in those context clues, but that’s just my perspective. I am in no way trying to insinuate that this depiction would be wrong – this is Hydra we’re talking about – as variety is after all the spice of life. I simply wanted to explain why I’ve chosen to go in a different direction than the bulk of what I’ve seen addressing this time period. There’s not exactly any hand-holding campfire sing-alongs in the castle, but it seemed to me that abusing two test subjects to the point of agony as you’re trying to give them god-like powers was pretty ill-advised given how easily they could turn around and kill you when it was all said and done.  
> Again, just a different take on that notion – hope you enjoyed it or it was at least thought-provoking. 
> 
> However, keep in mind that all things are subject to change...


	6. Last Chances

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“How familiar are the two of you with Dr. Mengele’s experiments?” he paused for dramatic effect, looking for the shock on both of their faces and pleasantly rewarded as they both looked very suddenly alarmed, “Yes, I know, how verboten that we discuss Nazi science in an organization that was borne of the Nazi party. And please, do not let me be misunderstood – I am no sympathizer. I do not share my country’s former enthusiasm for racial discrimination and I have no opinions neither towards nor against the Jewish people.”_
> 
>  
> 
> The greatest irony of the enhancement experiments is that they are performed by a German doctor on a set of Jewish Romani twins. A greater irony than that is that those twins would be the only successes the program would ever see.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: this chapter is insanely long. The next one is too. These babies keep getting bigger.
> 
> As always, feedback is wonderful and greatly appreciated. Thank you so much for everyone who takes the time to comment or leave kudos. I'm so glad you're enjoying this - I'm having a blast writing it. 
> 
> That said, it will likely come to an end around 10 chapters (with epilogue) and I plan to continue writing fic on AO3 since I'm already here - namely Stucky, some one shots, maybe the Tony stuff I've been wanting to do forever. I have an original series that meshes well with the Marvel universe, so I may premiere some of that here - provided anybody ever actually reads OC stuff on here? I don't feel like I see it much. IDK. Lemme know if that's something you'd be interested in. 
> 
> Anyways, thank you, and enjoy. May I suggest "Medicine" by Broods, who are quickly becoming the official Maxicest band for any of my writing purposes?

 A side effect of the actual application of the scepter’s power to the volunteer subjects was that the subjects themselves rarely remembered what exactly had happened in those fleeting few moments before they were exposed. Wanda imagined it a thousand times – being injected with a glowing blue serum, drinking down a cup of something viscous and bright, being locked in a room with a fearsome light – but could never land on a scenario that rang true. For all she knew, they’d been asked to lick the damn thing and had simply waited for something to happen. What she did remember was waking up in the new cells in their new home on another wing of the castle reserved for those in active experimentation, her arms strapped down to the bed and her heart pounding as she realized that she was unable to move. She called Pietro’s name – or at least she thought she had, but maybe nothing had even made it out of her mouth before she realized that her head was throbbing, her vision was blurry, and her very bones ached.

It had been kept quiet from the twins that they would be separated after each round of scepter-power application, strict orders coming from the top that they were to be lied to if they asked and otherwise not to mention any changes in routine. No one in any of the medical teams felt especially good about this reality as they knew it was an act of deliberate deception that would earn them scorn from the twins, but Baron von Strucker and the powers that be insisted the necessity was there. If either of them became actively unstable, they could hurt one another or worse – lose their will to endure. Their vitals were carefully managed via remote monitors and pads stuck to their skin, the spikes and valleys on the screens never quite becoming any less horrific for a staff trained to fear those patterns in basic medicine.

Ballato’s mouth had disappeared into a thin line as she watched Wanda writhe behind the glass, strapped down to the gurney in the radiation room. She had done alright until she and Pietro were removed from one another’s sight, and then the reality of being bound to a bed and helpless to the will of the organization became unbearably frightening. She had begun to panic, her breath coming faster and lighter until Ballato pressed her hands against the glass, demanding that the attendant press the intercom and calling out to her by name.

“Wanda! It’s going to be okay, Wanda, I promise. You need to look at me, okay? Keep your eyes on me.”

Some hours later, as blood ran from both of Wanda’s nostrils in a slow trickle and one eye blew to full dilation while the other remained unmoving and bloodshot, she couldn’t remember exactly what Dr. Ballato had said to her, but she could remember the way the woman’s tone had made her feel: like her mother was on the other side of that glass. She held the image in her head, the somewhat blurry memory of her mother’s face somewhere behind a pane of mirror glass, her hands that looked so much like Wanda’s own pressed flush against them. Wanda could barely remember her mother’s face, horrible though that was, but she could still see every ring on her slender fingers, the way her nails tapered into neat half-moons at the ends. She remembered the way she smelled, like a nice perfume mixed with cigarette smoke and the leather of her favorite purse. She remembered the way she said her name, with so much gentleness and love that it seemed like it had to be a false memory – no one had ever loved her that much, had they? No one but Pietro. His wild curls, the crooked smile of a little boy who loved nothing more than to play games with his twin sister – the image gave way to him now, a muscular young man who looked at her like he burned for nothing else, like he was somehow always ignited, never stopped burning. He loved her like that. He loved her more than that.

“Pietro,” she tried, her voice raw and cracking as she tasted blood in her mouth.

Medical staff scuttled around her, changing the IV bag and shining a flashlight into the eye that was refusing to dilate. She could smell the sterility of the room but her vision refused to clear, the light invasive but not painful the way it should have been, as she tried to move her fingers and found she had no feeling in her extremities. _Pietro_. She could only think his name as the muted fear rose in the back of her throat, never a more cold or helpless feeling having passed over her before in her life. _Pietro, where are you? Pietro, my brother, where am I?_ Her lips twitched, the lower one cracked and bleeding, as she felt the rhythm of the organ plugging away in her chest spike and change. _Fear_. Pietro’s fear. The invisible strings between them were pulling tight and she could feel his panic from somewhere unseen beyond this room.

She remembered blue light, and then nothing, but she could hear her brother screaming.

Pietro, on the other hand, had taken to the test with more unintentional gusto than anyone they’d applied it to thus far. After one round of energy exposure, the young man seemed little more than dazed, weathering the almost customary nosebleed and trying to sit up straight and walk by himself back to his cell. He murmured and slurred but was nearly coherent, the staff all exchanging promising glances as to his performance as even Istvan himself accompanied him back to the empty room and hoped he’d be too disoriented to realize Wanda wasn’t in it before they locked him in for observation. Surely enough, Pietro had stumbled in and reached for the sink to steady himself before he heard the door shut fast behind him and bothered to raise his head, looking around for his sister.

Rubbing his face, he paced about the room for a moment as he tried to acclimate himself, considering that maybe they were bringing Wanda in behind him. Surely she was just taking longer to come back from the testing – if something had been direly wrong, he would have known. They wouldn’t even have to tell him, he could just tell in the way that they had always just known. And then, as he stood over the sink and attempted to gather water into his shaking hands to splash his face, he felt it – the inside of his chest suddenly as still and cold as a glacier. Nothing. Their mutual heart had stopped without warning, and the fear inside of him was so intense that he lost his breath, trying to cry out for help but only succeeding in falling against the wall. _Wanda_. She was there, wasn’t she? She had to be. Except… he couldn’t feel her anymore. He rested his hand on his chest, palms trembling – of course, his heart was still beating.

Except that it wasn’t.

Just as surely as it had stopped, he felt a jolt down to his toes and suddenly, the cold sensation was gone and replaced with a sort of burning that robbed him of his focus, eyes blurring under the strain as he groped at the wall and tried to call out to the other side. He stayed this way for only a moment before clawing his way back onto his feet and pounding his fist against the dividing wall, somehow so sure that she was right there, right next door – held just out of his reach. He made feral, angry noises until he was able to form coherent words again, nothing but the purest rage in his now-pounding heart as he began his assault on the very cell.

What followed was an impressive display of stamina for someone who had just survived a procedure that killed most of its patients on the first round. For two hours, Pietro screamed himself hoarse, thrashing around the room with all the coordination of a drunken man and breaking whatever he could get his hands on as he alternated between kicking and punching at the wall. His voice was raw and torn but he kept screaming, kept bellowing at anything that crossed his field of vision that he wanted his sister right-the-hell now, goddammit, and they had better give him back his sister or else. He screamed her name until, finally exhausted from the afternoon’s events and the anxiety spike, he collapsed on the floor and hyperventilated, trying to catch his breath.

“’Stellaaaa!’,” mocked one of the scientists, shaking his head as he peered through the one way glass over Avignoine’s shoulder, “Did he finally wear himself out?”

Avignoine rubbed his temples. There would need to be three applications of this particular kind to obtain the results they were hoping for – maybe more – but almost no one had survived two full rounds and the few that did never survived the third. Here he had a specimen with the raw will and the smarts to not only survive it but take the ball and run for miles, and the damn boy was going to beat his own head in against the wall if they didn’t let him see the sister he had been expressly told that Pietro could not be allowed to see. He put on his glasses and stood at the desk, muttering a command for the underling to stay and watch him and to authorize a sleeping gas only in the event of extreme emergency.

A complex maze of hallways existed behind the row of observation cells, mostly leading to areas that housed equipment and large-scale installation pieces but used often to move the bodies of the volunteers that hadn’t survived the experience. There had been two casualties the day before and another was expected by the second round that afternoon – no matter what changes they tried to make to the amount or length of exposure or the methodology used, no one seemed to be able to handle a third wave. By Avignoine’s own estimation, the twins had been in the best physical shape and had the best mental preparedness against hardship this great; people affected by tragedy weren’t hard to find in this shithole of a little country but ones that had turned that tragedy into a nearly-successful movement against an oppressive government were a little more rare. This opportunity needed to be handled with the most delicate care, and von Strucker was giving half-cocked orders based on his ‘experience’ – the experience of NOT being one of the scientists that went in for round after round and watched person after person succumb to the massive trauma of exposure to the scepter’s stone.

Dr. Ballato stepped out into the hallway looking grim, her eyes more haunted than Avignoine had seen since they started the program. She glanced across and then altered her direction towards him, the conferring of results in mind.

“Was that him I heard screaming?” she inquired darkly, rubbing the back of her neck in exhaustion.

“It was,” he answered, casting a glance back at the cells, “He’s going to go insane if we keep them separate. This is a terrible idea. How is she holding up?”

The grim expression grew grimmer and Ballato’s brows knit in concern, shaking her head, “She’s not. She’s borderline catatonic, can’t get a word out of the girl. She’s been barely functional since we removed her from the radiation room.”

“He walked back to his own cell. He could survive it, Leslie. I think he can make it, if…”

Dr. Ballato studied him for a moment before finishing his sentence, “…if he survives their separation. Which she surely won’t, they had to defib her earlier, her heart stopped cold. Might be what he was experiencing.”

Walking slowly along the hall with his constituent beside him, Avignoine scrubbed a hand over his face and shook his head in bewilderment, “His vitals _did_ drop considerably for a moment. Do you really think they share sensation? Mengele had so much research on-“

“Might be best not to mention Mengele here,” Ballato quickly countered, glancing back over her shoulder and then trying to look ahead casually, “You know what Hydra’s history is.”

“Fair enough,” he conceded, pausing outside of the break room and looking at her, “…but seriously, do you think one could survive without the other? If he has a chance, we have to run with it, no matter what happens to her.”

Ballato’s eyes narrowed at him slightly, not bothering to hide a modicum of contempt for his carelessly chosen words, “No. I don’t think they can survive without one another. So we need to do something about that.”

“Herr Strucker doesn’t take suggestions from underlings, Leslie,” he countered wearily, “You know that. What exactly are you proposing?”

Chewing her lip, Ballato considered this. He was right – Strucker didn’t have a great track record of listening to suggestions. However, this could not only cost them the only real possibilities for success they had in the entire program: it could kill the girl that she found herself more attached to than she wanted to admit. The staff was encouraged to be cordial but not friendly, available but not warm. Keep the temperature of the water comfortable enough to be in but not welcoming enough that the participants could forget that their survival depended on their own ability to keep swimming, unaided. Gritting her teeth, she chose not to respond and turned back down the hallway to check in on Wanda, trying to mentally formulate a strong enough argument to compel the change she knew wasn’t just necessary but integral.

Of course, when she had finally summoned up the courage and created an opportunity to address this with Herr Strucker himself, she was met with a curt “absolutely not” and a dismissal.

***

An entire week passed this way. Pietro spent his days yo-yoing between extreme bursts of activity – which became increasingly difficult as his body attempted to make sense of whatever it had been exposed to in the radiation room – and shouting, demanding that they give him his sister back immediately, and passing out cold for hours at a time. The staff was able to creep in during one of these unconscious spells and remove the broken objects as well as wrap his hands and feet to ensure he didn’t damage them any further than he probably already had on the incredibly sturdy wall. He didn’t eat, wouldn’t take food or water until lack of choice forced Dr. Avignoine to have him sedated and fed through a tube. The strength he would need to survive a second round was nowhere in sight.

Wanda alternated between sleeping and waking but did little else, also refusing food and water to the point where she was given an IV. Her hair hung in tangled snarls that Dr. Ballato tried to gently comb loose when she slept, drawing looks from the other staff. She didn’t care – the twins were being tortured with this separation, as far as she could tell, and whatever little measures of comfort she could bring to a girl who would never survive round two, she was going to do. Wanda’s face began to grow thin again, both of them losing the spark in their eyes and the flush in their skin that had been so hard won through months of work. Ballato was beginning to feel like she was losing everything she’d built – all progress would soon waste away the way the twins almost had before their arrival.

The once-hopeful demeanor of the immediate staff had changed drastically. Istvan seemed constantly worried, hands wringing and brow furrowed, as he moved through the hallways and observed the two in their respective cells. Any excited talk about how they might have finally had successful candidates or how the project might actually see full completion was quieted; they all understood that the week between round one and round two was nothing but a wait for the execution chamber, the same was it usually was for any volunteers. Any treatment of the twins as special had died off as Baron von Strucker strolled through the halls and flatly handed out orders to the head doctors. Dr. Ballato hated the sound of his voice, like sandpaper on her very eardrums.

Wanda usually hovered somewhere between conscious and unconscious, blessedly free of the burden of fully waking but never quite resting either. She saw visions she didn’t understand, swirls of red in space as they moved through the body of a lithe brunette woman that wasn’t herself. She watched over and over again in rapt fascination as it broke her body apart into nothingness before coming towards her, undulating around her hands and injecting itself into her wrists and through her veins. Sometimes, it was a man and then a group of creatures, lit from the inside by a powerful, terrible purple light, their hands clasped. Other times, it was a glowing blue cube that felt so far away that she could travel light years and never see it, something existing so far beyond the realm of her reality that it couldn’t possibly have been real. She felt her head grow hot, her eyes burning in their sockets but granting her deeper sight, greater vision. Pietro was nowhere to be found in her red visions, only in the ones where she remembered the home they both had lost: the way the ceiling had simply opened up, swallowing the entire table and both parents with it, how her brother had grabbed her and pulled her under the bed without even thinking, the way they had lain there for two entire days waiting to die while their parents’ blood seeped into piles of broken concrete. The rescue workers had pulled them out in pieces. This detail wasn’t spared from their young ears. War spared children nothing.

Pietro would greet a pitch-black, ugly unconsciousness that rendered him nearly dead, only dreaming every so often. In these dreams he felt wind passing through his hair, over his cheeks to the point where it stung the way it sometimes did when he was a child who stuck his head out of the car window. He felt movement, as though he were standing on a conveyer belt and being passed along an assembly line, somehow always in transit without actually moving. Somehow, there was always somewhere to run, somewhere he had to go but he could never remember exactly how to get there – back to the commune, to the apartment building, to a new place he was sure he had never been but memory told him that he had. His hands always felt cold. He wondered where the hell his sister was, and he awoke crying out for her the way he had at birth.

The morning of the second round of tests, Pietro came to on the cold tile floor, his cheek pressed into a puddle of drool and his entire body aching from sleeping on something so hard. The blur of his vision focused on a pair of combat boots a few feet away: someone was sitting on his bed. Someone who felt terribly familiar and at the same time, utterly new. He blinked a few times, grunting out a noise of surprised alarm that barely made it out of his mouth as he pulled his throbbing arms up to push himself off the floor and onto staggering feet. The woman on the bed sat with her forearms resting on her thighs, the knobs of her knees intimately familiar. Pietro blinked a few times at her lopsided Mohawk, the shorter parts having grown out considerably but the contrast in parts still there. She looked simultaneously much, much older and more tired and somehow the same: full lips bookmarked by smoker’s lines, her eyes haunted half-moons with dark circles beneath but the last vestiges of a child’s rounded face having given way to the angular lines of her wide jaw, her chin.

Pietro’s face screwed into disoriented confusion as he scrubbed a hand over his mouth, staring for a long moment before murmuring to himself.

“…Vanya?”

A partial smile crossed her lips and she blinked back at him, tilting her head slightly, her voice rougher than he had ever heard it but sing-song, almost mocking, “’No justice, no peace’… so much for boycotting the fascist leash, yeah?”

Somewhere in the pit of his stomach, Pietro’s sensibilities about what he and Wanda had agreed to do evaporated under the weight of the ideals they had abandoned to do so. He felt ashamed, like he had somehow failed both Vanya and Alyosha, maybe his parents too. What the hell had he bought into in the name of protecting his sister, and what would it take to buy them out? Could they be bought out at all? Wasn’t it too late already?

“Vanya,” he tried again, shaking his head with disbelief as his mouth hung slack, trying to find the words or even the correct sentiments.

“We do what we must for that which we love, don’t we?” she asked, undeterred by his inability to say anything but her name, “I loved Sokovia. I loved Alyosha. I did this for them, both of them.”

As she stood, Pietro took note that any of the curves that he remembered so well had been burned off in favor of lean, sinewy muscle. She looked unwell, gaunt and sallow and tired, and he hadn’t seen just how pale she’d grown until she stepped closer and into the direct light. Were he easy to startle, Pietro might have gasped – she looked as though she were dead already.

“The testing is almost over now,” she said lowly, her voice cracking with wear, “I made it through two. I will not make the third. They dig my grave tonight as we speak.”

“ _How_ do we speak, Vanya?” he asked, finally able to form coherent sentences as he peered into her face with the mixed sinking of his heart and betrayal in his belly, “I’ve been trying to break out of this room for a week now. Where is Wanda? Have you s-“

A hand that had not touched him in ages – that he had tried to forget had touched him in the first place – came up to cup across his mouth and silence him, and he did not fight her. It hardly seemed right. He was still processing that she was alive and in his room, and all he could do was stare as she gave him that half-smile that was about as warm as her expression ever got. Shaking her head, she clicked her tongue against her teeth and cast her gaze at the door, lingering for a long moment before she spoke again with a voice like water through rusting pipes.

“If you survive, it will be only through Wanda. If Wanda survives, it will be only through you. And you _must_ survive, Pietro. This is our last chance to change the world.”

There was a pounding at the door, the sound of muffled voices as something heavy slammed against the metal. His eyes widening in confusion, Pietro pulled her hand off of his face and made a quick stride to attempt to pull the door open himself. The screaming on the other side was louder and more familiar than it had been before, sending shooting chills up his spine as he began to yank with renewed vigor. _Wanda_. She was on the other side, trying to get to him, and absolutely nothing on this earth would keep him from opening that door. Somehow, it was now too heavy for one person and he whirled around to demand that Vanya come and help, show him how to escape before he and his sister perished to the testing and the separation.

No one was in the room.

Confused, Pietro sat up on the tile floor, blinking in a daze as he watched the door open with no trouble and the medical crew coming in to begin prepping him for what was sure to be his final walk down that hallway.

***

Dr. Avignoine had dreaded this day all week long. Asking for an extension on the time frame for testing felt only like begging for a stay of execution, and he had only succeeded in getting an extra day to try to get the twins in good enough shape to handle the round that killed most of their subjects. He might have been tempted to think that Baron von Strucker had lost interest in his prize twins, the pinnacle of possibility for the program, except that he still asked about them regularly and demanded frequent reports. Though his staff delivered grim stats with even grimmer faces, the man in charge hardly seemed phased by this doomed scenario, giving the go ahead for testing to continue at the same pace. The flustered or concerned seeming doctors received not even a hint of legitimacy to their plight, and he continued on much in the way he always had, doling out orders and overseeing experimentation with the scepter itself.

Dr. Ballato had gone into Wanda’s room early to brush out her hair, pulling it back into a loose braid. Why a braid the doctor wasn’t sure – perhaps it was a throwback to her own mother and her own childhood – but it was a simplistic ritual that had once brought her comfort. Now, she looked at Wanda’s hollow eyes and fought back the rising bile in her throat – the girl was going to die, and her brother would surely go with her. They were going to lose them and she didn’t even have a solid reason as to why – Von Strucker gave no answers and offered no insight. There was a rage in her that she hadn’t experienced in her entire life, a sneaky, spiraling hatred of the man she was working for and the growing realization that she could no longer ignore the blatant lack of regard for human life. If she managed to get out of here alive, she was going to do everything in her power to stop this, to make sure-

“Doctor?” the attendee’s voice interrupted her thoughts and she snapped her attention back to the door, “We’re ready. Herr Strucker has asked that we use room six instead of the standard.”

Ballato knit her brow in confusion. Room 6 had been primarily utilized as a holding room, the ‘waiting room to hell’ as a lot of the medical staff referred to it, but was considered too big to be a safe place to experiment with the scepter’s abilities. Too much space meant a less controlled environment and toying with that kind of interstellar power was a poor enough idea in the most predictable settings. Still, she sat down the brush and moved to crouch down in front of Wanda; she didn’t want to look her in the eyes, knowing full well that she couldn’t hide her own sorrow at what she knew was coming, but she couldn’t bring herself to dehumanize her back to nothingness. Wanda deserved to be looked in the eyes – she was going to die, and Ballato was going to help them kill her.

The thought made her sick.

She forced a small smile and tried to get her attention, clearing her throat before speaking in that brogue that Wanda now had no trouble understanding, “Alright, Wanda, we’re going to head back to the testing rooms now. We’ll wheel you in, it will be just like last time.”

Though she had failed to make eye contact through the bulk of the week, Wanda suddenly looked over at the doctor, her large eyes doll-like and glassy but eerily penetrating. No words left her mouth. There was nothing to say. Wanda half wanted to challenge her, to see if this woman could have the courage or perhaps the audacity to try to tell her everything would be fine. _Tell me. Tell me I’m going to die. Tell me the truth._

Dr. Ballato couldn’t hold the gaze for long and stood to allow the staff to take her. Down the hall a medical team had assembled outside of room six, looking fairly confused themselves. One attendee trotted over to the doctor, pointing back towards the room with her thumb.

“Um, doctor? Von Strucker is in the control room, he says he wants to see you.”

The doctor couldn’t hold off her look of alarm as she paused, turning to glance back at Wanda, “I’ll be right back, okay?”

Wanda said nothing, eyes cast down at the floor.

The inside of the booth was as minimally lit as usual; to keep from wasting much-needed power, any auxiliary lights or non-essential function is cut. The scepter had proven itself to be too loose a variable for anything but the most tightly controlled settings that they could replicate here in the Sokovian compound, so no one but the highest level of personnel – including the lead doctors – were ever allowed behind these monitors. Standardly it was Dr. Ballato or Dr. Avignoine and a few highly skilled technicians working the machines, the attendees banished to the next room until the experimentation was over and they were to retrieve either the subject or the subject’s dead body from the room. While Herr Strucker and a few other administrative personnel – occasionally Istvan – did pop in from time to time to observe, they didn’t have a mainstay position during the testing.

So it looked somewhat unusual to see Baron von Strucker himself standing at the main panel, his fingers idly poking at knobs on the main switchboard as Dr. Avignoine stood off to the side, a barely-muted terror in his eyes as he caught Dr. Ballato’s gaze. There could be a million reasons why he was in here with them, they both knew, but there was more likely only one. Fear gripped through her body as the doctor moved to stand on the opposite side of the Baron, trying her best to seem unafraid and open to suggestion.

“Sir,” she greeted almost quietly, her voice kept forcibly even.

“Doctor,” the Baron returned, finally turning to face both of his lead medical experts as he rested his hands on the back of a chair, “Do not be alarmed. I know there has been some concern as to my methods, but if you are both so inclined to keep your current positions, I will need to have assurance that I have made myself entirely clear in saying that I have had my reasons and neither of you need to understand what they are, yes?”

Glancing coolly from one doctor to another, he awaited their inevitable nods. Satisfied, he moved to pace about, inspecting the room as he spoke.

“How familiar are the two of you with Dr. Mengele’s experiments?” he paused for dramatic effect, looking for the shock on both of their faces and pleasantly rewarded as they both looked very suddenly alarmed, “Yes, I know, how _verboten_ that we discuss Nazi science in an organization that was borne of the Nazi party. And please, do not let me be misunderstood – I am no sympathizer. I do not share my country’s former enthusiasm for racial discrimination and I have no opinions neither towards nor against the Jewish people.”

Dr. Ballato hardly felt comforted by this assurance as she watched him, nodding to ensure he knew she was listening.

“That having said, I also find there to be no wisdom in the discarding of valuable scientific information simply because it occurred at a time when, ah, let’s say _ethics_ were not as much of a priority as they are now. Where would we be without these studies, this dark history of ours? How many countless things have grown from them that have gone on to benefit millions?”

Von Strucker paused and whirled back around on his heel slowly, starting a new pacing line down the center of the room as he clasped his hands behind his back with ever the perfect posture and confidence of a former military man. Clearly this was someone who enjoyed an audience as well as knew how to speak to one – part of what made him so terrifying to the staff was how in the entire time they had spent at this compound under his direction, no one had ever seen him lose his temper. Herr Strucker did not yell nor raise his voice; he did not raise a hand or a gun at anyone, no matter the ineptitude. His countenance was cool and detached and he remained unflappable in the face of failure as well as success, making him all the more monstrous in his coldness and intelligence. He began again, his voice lowering into a more serious octave.

“The _Todesengel_ , as he was sometimes called, ah… ‘angel of death’? Yes. He founded the human experimentation laboratory at Birkenau when it was only a Romani labor camp. Eventually, when the true intentions of the movement became clear and it became a death camp, Mengele collected specimens from the line-ups to use as fodder for his experimentations. He took a special interest in twins-“ Von Strucker gestured toward the hallway as the doors to the radiation room opened, the attendees beginning to wheel in Wanda, “- because he was certain they could somehow be predicated early in pregnancy and could possibly increase the birth rates of, ah, _racially desirable_ citizens.”

Ballato watched as Wanda’s sullen gaze passed the glass, not an ounce of fight left inside of her. Something from that scepter had stripped her down but being removed from Pietro had glassed the fields of her very being until they were as barren as the Sokovian winter itself. Biting the inside of her lip, she cast a worried glance at the equally worried looking Dr. Avignoine. The man looked on the verge of deciding whether to run or beg, and she couldn’t say she was holding up much better, only that she hoped it looked a lot less obvious on her own face.

“Now, most of Mengele’s experiments on twins were utterly worthless,” Von Strucker continued, gesturing as if brushing away the very notion before he began turning on panels and calibrating machinery with an ease that was alarming, “He was well educated and had access to some of the greatest doctors of his time, but he was not quite the brilliant doctor everyone claims he was. He would hack off the limbs of one twin to register pain reactions in the other, infect one with a fatal disease, or simply deliberately kill one twin for the very same reason, and though time and time again he saw that the links between them were not supernatural as he and Hitler had hoped, it did nothing to stop him from continuing. Because he was not interested in science - he was interested in torture.”

Von Strucker cut on the overhead lights in the radiation room, the glare coming through the glass and illuminating the doctors in blue.

“But _we_ , doctors, are not interested in torture, no. And we noticed very quickly that there was one thing that Mengele missed, a single recurring factor in his data that somehow never quite caught his attention or curiosity in the way one might have imagined.”

The doors on the other side of the radiation room opened and someone cried out, a noise of desperation. Though he could hardly walk in a straight line on his own, Pietro dove through the group of attendees and grabbed for Wanda, who had suddenly become alert and was reaching out for him. Ballato’s mouth hung open as she watched the twins clutch at one another for dear life, shouting out one another’s names. Attendees scrambled, trying to pull them apart and frantically looking around for help or an explanation as how this was allowed to happen when Von Strucker hit the intercom button, the machine coming to life with a mechanical squawk.

“This is Herr Strucker, you are not to separate them. Leave the room immediately.”

A momentary wave of confusion passed as they turned to look at the glass and then one another. However, it was indeed only a moment as no one wanted to defy the head honcho and they made a quick and orderly exit through either set of double doors, leaving Wanda and Pietro wrapped around one another on the floor, the sounds of her soft sobbing echoing against the walls. Without thinking, Ballato put her hand on the glass and watched in a mix of relief and fear – they were together again, sure, but what was the meaning of this cruelty? Was Von Strucker planning this all along? The lights dimmed slightly as the Baron turned on the last piece of machinery, watching the screen as it calibrated the exact levels of exposure for the room. The number – so much higher than the standard – made her stomach drop to her knees.

“As I was saying,” he continued undaunted and held down the button to lower the filtration shutters against the observation glass, the whirring ominous, “He missed something integral. And this is where you’ll both want to take a note to learn the lesson I am attempting to impart unto you here today. His research suggested that twins were more likely to survive lethal experimentations for longer if they were reunited after a separation.”

Dr. Ballato felt Dr. Avignoine’s eyes on her before she even looked over. They stared at one another for a long moment before turning to gape wide-eyed at the Baron, who for his own part typed away without a care in the world. Monster. He’d had this plan all along and no matter how awful or painful it was going to be for them, the ultimate goal was their survival. Avignoine had been willing to sacrifice Wanda if it meant Pietro’s success; Ballato had been willing to break protocol if it meant Wanda’s survival. Neither of them had imagined that there might have been some greater plan to Strucker’s seemingly casual callousness, and yet here he was with a master plan that might have saved them both, provided he wasn’t full of shit as Ballato half expected. Still, the numbers on the dial were entirely too high, exceeding the recommended levels by double.

“Sir,” Avignoine began, his voice breaking nervously as he tried to stammer out his plea, “Those numbers, they can’t possibly-“

“Have you learned nothing from what I just tried to teach you?” Baron Von Strucker cut him off, only sounding mildly annoyed as he kept his eyes on the screens, “I have a plan. And that plan involves the both of you acquiescing to the fact of the matter that I may know better than both of you do what’s best here.”

Avignoine’s mouth hung open, staring in alarm and disbelief as the Baron murmured to himself, “This will work, I am sure of it…”

The twins had hardly noticed what was happening – the moment they saw one another, the rest of the circumstances became completely irrelevant. Pietro had torn away from his attendees with feral ferocity, practically launching himself at the feet of Wanda’s wheelchair. She had sensed him coming, felt a stirring up her spine that said he was near but had hardly the time to register before she saw him, his eyes piercing hers from yards off, and suddenly the week of inactivity meant nothing as she attempted to scramble to her feet and towards him. The end result was the both of them on the floor, her face buried against his neck and her torso pressed tight against his as he locked his arms around her with unbreakable strength. No one was taking them away from each other alive. Von Strucker’s voice caught his attention on the intercom, but he hardly registered a word in his zeal to focus solely on Wanda.

“Wandika,” he whispered into her hair hoarsely as she cried against his shoulder, “I am here, we’re both here, I will not leave you again, I won’t…”

His wrapped hand stroked down her hair, his arms still holding her so tightly against him that he could feel the little bird flutter of her heaving breath, the pounding of her heart in her ribs flush against his in that perfect, loud cadence that reminded them they were both there and both alive. Refusing to relinquish her, Pietro pulled her in closer and turned his head to glare around at any who might attempt such a foolish task. Much to his surprise, the room had cleared – even Wanda’s wheelchair had been taken out. He wondered for a long moment how much time had passed, half reminding himself that no time was enough time now that he was back beside his sister and half alarmed at how they were left alone with no recourse.

Then, much like the first time (not that Pietro or Wanda remembered it as per the standard), a faint blue light began to glow at the end of two pointed vestibules near the observation glass, a loud humming and whirring beginning to grown in its ominous noise.

“The testing,” Wanda croaked, but even that sounded beautiful to his bereaved ears, “They are going to kill us, Pietro. We cannot survive.”

His jaw clenched as he held tight to her, blue eyes boring into the glass as though they were back in the streets and he was staring down the anonymous face of one of the many police. It was the same sensation – looking blindly with rage into something as unflinching as stone but remembering that somewhere back there was something living. Somewhere underneath the mirrored glass, there was something that knew fear. He gave it a defiant stare, hoping that whoever was behind the booth was shrinking into their seat at the act itself, before he turned his attention back to Wanda. The lights around them began to glow brighter blue, illuminating the room, and there was the sound of a gathering burst coming up through the pipes.

“No they won’t,” he growled, his bruised and battered hands turning Wanda’s face to look at him as he imparted every bit of confidence, every single ounce of fight in his body unto her, staring at her with a love that could destroy worlds, “They will not. Just hold on to me, okay? Just be with me.”

His words, his gaze filled the hollow place of her chest and she could feel his courage burning through her, igniting her own. _Yes_. They would survive. There was no other option. And in so long as they were together, there was nothing that would stop them. She leaned up and kissed him soundly on the mouth, uncaring who might be watching behind that glass, and the whirring noise grew into such cacophony that she was sure heaven was being pulled down around them to shatter like porcelain at their feet. In the eye of Wanda’s mind, they were back in the kitchen of their apartment in those few fleeting milliseconds before the floor swallowed down their parents, watching teacups fall from the cabinet and shatter against the tile. She could feel the sinewy strength of a young boy’s arm around her middle, pulling her back towards the bed with the same ferocious strength that she felt when Pietro locked his arms around her at night in their cell, pulling her back towards that bed. Forever falling towards beds together, forever locked in a tangle of dependency that they’d rather die than give up, forever laying beneath a crumbling ceiling or above a disintegrating floor. A world in permanent transit, perpetual destruction spun around them as they remained the only constant, the only nucleus of the known universe existing in their locked palms, their flush mouths, their joined bodies.

The world disappeared into impossible blue-white, all that remained in those final seconds the sensation of Pietro’s hands on her face and his mouth soft and warm against hers, kissing her with passion born of creatures that knew one another from the moment of their first breaths.

***

At that exact moment, across the world and above the Potomac River, a soldier fell from a burning ship in the sky, and the person he loved more than anything in the world saved him from drowning.

S.H.I.E.L.D. fell.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	7. Big Plans

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The Avengers laid siege to the castle in Sokovia, completely unaware of the chain of events they would be setting into motion._
> 
> _Wanda and Pietro, though also completely unaware of what would be coming, were ready for this. They had been waiting for this for over a year._
> 
> _They had been waiting for this all their lives._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for my delay in uploading - those of you who read me frequently know that I'm inclined to post every five days or so, and I believe it's almost been two weeks. I just started a new job and spent a week doing trainings out of town, which put a cramp on my free time. However, now we're getting started and things are settling in (not necessarily down, it's a busy busy job) so I'll be back on my regular. 
> 
> This is a huge chapter. Like, very big. Size wise and event wise. A lot is happening here. The chapters that will follow are also bigger - standardly they tend to be around 10 pages, but I've been pushing 13+ since I wrote this one. I've also got a semi-definite stopping point with Chapter 10, so the end is in sight. 
> 
> (10 might or might not include the epilogue, I haven't decided)
> 
> Anyway, thank you all so much for the amazing feedback and attention paid to this story. It has become a much larger beast than I'd ever anticipated as I thought I'd write four chapters and be done, but look where we are now. 
> 
> Please enjoy, and I can't wait to hear what you think.

Six months after the successful test, the castle was grumbling and shuddering with every hit from every shell, the staff gathering nervously in central hubs and wearing pinched expressions. Wanda and Pietro stood in the doorway to the main atrium of the security center and traded dark looks. Another shell hit the force field. Iron Man was somewhere outside, firing away at the exterior of the castle. Tony Stark himself was here in Sokovia, and the irony was simultaneously so bitter and so sweet that neither of the twins could bring themselves to be too outwardly excited by the proximity. Not yet, at least. Von Strucker herded the most important members of the staff into that atrium and dispensed orders, gave warnings, demanded no surrender. The twins reached for one another’s hands.

They were only waiting for the right moment to disappear.

***

Over the past six months…

One of the hardest things for Pietro to contend with about his new abilities was the fact that he now had a much, much deeper understanding of the eastern philosophy – no, the truth – that time wasn’t linear. He was never more acutely aware of that than when he blurred through the facility at top speed, his own heart pounding in his chest and his body reverberating with the heady, delicious sensation of his feet snapping against the floor so lightly that he hardly felt real. In addition to leeching the pigment out of the ends of his hair – oh the irony, given how often he had bleached it as a youth – the treatments had given him an ability he had never imagined possible and a power he could have never fathomed before. The figures around him stood nearly stock still, the rest of the world lost to his speed, and the exact machinations of reality at large became very clear in a quantum-physics sort of way that was so far over Pietro’s head that it made him a little dizzy to think about. He’d leave the understanding of the mechanics to someone else and settle for the instinctual knowings, the gut feelings that he had always allowed to guide himself as well as Wanda.

The first few weeks had been continued separation but with allotted visits and in cells with an intercom that allowed them to speak to one another. Much to his shock and awe, they didn’t need them – he could hear her loud and clear through the wall, her thoughts just as plain as conversation when she chose to share them. And she did – often.

Wanda was awash in her own flood of new wonders, having scoffed at first at the childish set of blocks left in her room. However, once the red miasma of her dreams materialized into a reality at the tips of her fingers and she figured out that she could actually move things with it, they became invaluable tools in her education. At first, she could lift them, finding that twisting her fingers this way or that would produce different results in trajectory or speed. Then, she could move them while holding them up, concentrating her efforts on maintaining their placement while simultaneously manipulating them into the desired constellation. Then, after but a few days of tinkering, Wanda tilted her head in curiosity and clapped her palms together.

Destruction. Brutal, utter destruction.

Dr. Ballato had never seen Baron Von Strucker look so outwardly pleased in the entire time she’d known him.

The doctors and extended staff gathered day in and day out to watch them in their cells. The miracle had happened – it had worked. Istvan had never seemed so elated before, the smile on his face almost ceaseless as he watched Pietro zip around the room, groaning or growling in discomfort, or Wanda winding her fingers in the air, her eyes shining red in the fluorescent light. He often thought of the first day he’d arrived at the commune, how when he introduced himself to them he had noticed immediately how close together they stood, how their eyes tracked one another in any room no matter how many people were inside. The bond between them was almost palpable and their rage was too – no one had more fire or violence inside of them than these two skinny kids who wanted to murder Tony Stark slowly with his own silk tie. Istvan liked to think that he had known all along on instinct that they would be the ones to succeed. The truth was that it had been a gamble for everyone involved, but a gamble well-won.

Dr. Ballato’s relief at their survival was countered only by her guilt for their suffering to get to this point. Wanda had barely acknowledged anyone but Pietro since the test had completed, though the doctor felt it had less to do with ire towards her and more to do with being completely ensconced in the new sensations swimming inside of her head. In as far as they’d been able to discern, her abilities seemed primarily telekinetic, but there was something else that no one but Ballato was suspecting – that Wanda was somehow able to read minds. Coming forward with this suspicion would be ridiculous, she knew – there was no way to sanely articulate that when she was around Wanda now, she somehow felt as if the inside of her head was less…private, at least not without arousing suspicion and a possible trip to the psych department for a “stress evaluation”. Still, it didn’t alleviate the feeling at all, and by the time Wanda had started coming back to the normal realm for longer stretches of time between disappearing into her new abilities, she was certain.

Pietro’s metabolism had shot up beyond human capabilities, and Wanda’s brain activity was unprecedented. Any testing that occurred on the two of them was done with silk gloves – no one wanted to risk that the twins might have revenge on their minds from the time they spend writhing in torment and apart. However much Pietro seemed to enjoy the skittish demeanors of the attendees - and often made it a point to antagonize them a little when they did their work, making ominous comments whenever they were drawing blood or taking sudden, lightning-quick jaunts around the room before stepping onto a scale - neither twin seemed particularly angry with any of the staff. Wanda gave no resistance to having her blood drawn, her temperature taken, or when Dr. Ballato was forced to interrupt her sessions to remind her that it was time to eat or take a shower. She was placid, her eyes distant, as though she were off elsewhere and contending with something else entirely.

Though Pietro posed the more immediate physical threat, everyone was markedly more afraid of Wanda. This was something Pietro was almost visibly proud of.

Given that the administration seemed very eager to please now that the twins were fully weaponized, Pietro used this new leverage to demand that Istvan tell him what had become of Vanya, if she had survived the testing. Istvan stared at Pietro in alarm and then handed him a manila folder containing the post-mortem report and photos for Subject 149, Vanyanka K., dated for two years earlier. Her blanched face looked the same as she had when she appeared to him. Pietro closed the file and walked away – he didn’t believe in ghosts, and he wasn’t about to start, no matter how sick the sinking feeling in his chest made him.

Of course, he told Wanda. She didn’t seem surprised.

“Your doctor seems very sorry,” Pietro had internally remarked one evening as he and Wanda sat with their backs to the wall that separated them, mirroring one another as he tossed a rubber ball at the wall at breakneck speed as if it were nothing and she floated a block before her, “She can hardly keep eye contact now. Looks at you like you broke her heart.”

“She meant well,” Wanda responded without saying a word but Pietro heard her, loud and clear, “Yours, not so much.”

Pietro scoffed, and to anyone watching from the halls or the monitoring booths, it looked as though he was scoffing at nothing as neither twin said a single word aloud. The peculiar way this particular event became a ritual did not escape notice, however – and this was how they ultimately found that Wanda possessed the ability for neuro-electrical interfacing.

It was another week before they discovered the mental manipulation when, during a routine dual examination, Wanda reached up and curled her fingers near Dr. Avignoine’s face, the red wisps reaching into his head and causing his eyes to shine over the same shade of crimson. The rest of the team had scattered away, certain that this was the nightmare they had imagined might happen once the twins were fully enhanced, a few scrambling for the door and screaming for help. Dr. Ballato froze, gaping in a mix of awe and horror as Avignoine was treated to a tour of every memory he had- of the way he had bullied an ex-girlfriend until she had tried to kill herself. Though he was reluctant to admit exactly what he had been shown, the fact that she had been able to show him was of great interest to Von Strucker, who finally came down and spoke with the twins himself.

They were horrified of him at first. For all intents and purposes, he looked like a Nazi that had crawled from a history book and sounded much the same – seeing him in the hallway and beyond the glass hadn’t had the same impact as hearing that voice, sitting beneath that glacier-cold gaze behind his monocle. The alarm on their faces had amused him into a chuckle as he explained that, _No, meine freund, you have nothing to be afraid of. I can understand why a pair of Jewish Romani twins might have their apprehensions about me, but I assure you – I have wanted nothing but your success from the very beginning. Istvan told me you were the ones, and I believed him._

Pietro hesitated to believe him in that regard, but Wanda sensed he was telling the truth. His aims were lofty; she knew that much without even prying. She had heard them speaking of how SHIELD had fallen and shared the knowledge with Pietro, and somehow it comforted them knowing that their entry onto the playing field came just as the entire board was changing, shifting its pieces into a formation thus far unseen. Hydra was now irrelevant as well, Von Strucker had explained with complete indifference to the subject matter in a way that surprised the twins, but the funding they had received had from the fallen agency would always be appreciated because it had given this new beast its very own superheroes.

“Superheroes.” The word felt disgustingly capitalist on Wanda’s tongue. Pietro remembered briefly his childhood, calling himself Captain Sokovia, and could hardly repress the bitter smirk at the irony of the current situation. They were given new clothing, good shoes –  Pietro became the owner of his first pair of brand name sneakers and Wanda was given jewelry and makeup in her chosen palette of color, likely a decision on Ballato’s part. The food improved, though it had been an improvement over their previous situation to begin with. They were placated with time together and alone, given free rein to wander the castle and otherwise accommodated to the best of their whims. It was nice, sure, but the twins knew there was the ulterior motive of insuring compliance. If the remnants of Hydra were looking for saviors, ‘enchanceds’ as they were being called, that would go out at their beck and call to fight on behalf of some organization with its eyes on domination, they had another thing coming. Still, as Pietro listened to the spiel for the umpteenth time, he could feel Wanda beside him reminding him to keep his cards close to his chest, that their time would come and they would be beholden to no one once it did.

They had begun to think it wasn’t coming at all by the time the first radio squawked to life with a report that the Avengers were making for the castle.

Six months in the facility hadn’t readied them for actual combat in the way that Von Strucker would have liked. There was very little that could be done with their respective abilities that didn’t involve serious damage to life or limb, and though they roused a few unwilling sacrifices to subject themselves to the task, the twins had refused so adamantly that it had been reconsidered. Wanda roused old memories, both good and bad, in willing participants and learned how to heat-seek their deepest fears, the things that could undo them if used against them. Ballato herself had volunteered, figuring turnabout was fair play after everything she had subjected them to, but Wanda hadn’t caused her any grievance. The thought crossed her mind as she went leafing through the countless memories of Leslie Ballato’s father, who had died when she was but a teenager, calling her ‘Daisy’ in his thick brogue, singing songs to her to make her smile. _Daisy, daisy, give me the answer, do – I’m half crazy, over the love of you._ Wanda saw every crack, every place to apply pressure to break her – her father’s death had left her with so many open, gaping wounds that never closed fully but rather sealed over enough to stop bleeding that she could have had any pick of which ones to salt – but she didn’t. As soon as the vision had released her, Ballato blinked the flowing tears from her amber eyes and looked down to see Wanda’s thin hand curled in hers.

The fact that the twins were capable of compassion gave Ballato so much hope. It also reminded her of how horrible she was by comparison. Wanda had sensed the depression she was falling into but found no way of absolving her, had nothing to absolve her with even if she could. Sokovians lived in a shared darkness that few others could understand; there was nothing to be done for someone else’s sadness when you were busily drowning in your own. They found their moments of joy wherever they could have them; for the twins, it was stolen kisses in the few times they could make away from everyone else, or the way he was now treated to the exact thoughts and sounds of Wanda touching herself at night because there was a wall preventing him from touching her (and as a sidenote to that, being a nearly twenty year old man at this point, of course Pietro had tested out his abilities in regards to how quickly he could make himself come – the friction burns on his penis prevented him from ever considering it again and reminded him that some things still needed to be taken on at a normal pace). Pietro happily smoked any maze that was built for him, crushed any records of speed on foot, and had even jetted across a running river, half for the entertainment of the staff and half because there was almost nothing now save touching Wanda that felt better than stretching his legs somewhere that wasn’t that cramped, dark castle.

But when the bombshells began to fall, that rage that had lain dormant in the both of them boiled back up to the surface and reminded them that there was so much violence in their history that there would need to be no practice, no pretending to learn what it means to hurt someone else. The man who had laid waste to theirs and several other small countries, the celebrity who was idolized in America despite his discretions that had cost countless lives, was within miles, within their very grasp; it was all Pietro could do not to blow that popsicle stand as quickly as possible and beeline straight for the first red and gold thing he could see. When the blur of the Iron Man suit passed the windows and the repulsors could be heard whizzing by, they both felt their hearts blossom into full flower of absolute, unbridled rage.

Iron Man was here.

They could both still see Alyosha’s mural on the wall in the fallen commune hotel, the image burned into their eyes until they could see it in their sleep. While they had both given up the idea that Tony himself was the only evil that truly needed eradicating to set all right with the world – they had grown up enough to know that wasn’t the case, that he was but an admittedly large piece in a much larger puzzle that thrived on the blood of impoverished countries and America’s own working poor – they still had never absolved that inborn hatred they both carried around for the man. His name was the harbinger of death that had ripped their entire world into shreds and then stared them in the face for days until it psychologically broke them; the Stark name was a blight upon humanity, no matter how many other fish would still need to be fried. A blistering roar from the forest around them reminded them that some fish would indeed be bigger than others. Wanda shuddered slightly and tightened her grip on Pietro’s hand, and he felt her response without a word: anxiousness, eagerness, and just the smallest amount of fear. A wise amount of fear, perhaps.

“Strucker, the twins!”

“They are not ready.”

“ _No_ , sir,” the scientist gestured to the now empty doorway, “The _twins_.”

***

When they hit the breeched doorway near the lower right quadrant – the only safe point of escape that would take them out through the railroad tracks that entered beneath the mountain – Pietro turned to Wanda and put his hands on her face to steady her.

“You go straight there, down near the scepter, and you protect it,” his eyes searched hers, clear and genuine in a way they weren’t with anyone else, “I will go and draw first blood, and then I swear it, I will return for you faster than you can imagine, yeah?”

Wanda’s dark lips curled into a small smile, “This was my plan originally, brother, remember? You don’t have to tell me twice.”

Though they both knew the inherent foolishness of becoming too cocky, they couldn’t help but have a strong faith in their abilities. There was no one who could capture Pietro, no matter what they had on their side. Wanda could allow herself to be cornered by multiple foes and would still walk away if she were able to influence just one. They were the real threat, not the flailing limbs of Hydra’s headless beast or the scepter itself. Fortunately for them, they had the element of surprise on their side as well as the underestimation of the staff around them – apparently, while Von Strucker had been busy dressing them up and parading them around, he somehow lost sight of the fact that they had been chief organizers of the only almost-successful rebellion their country ever hosted.

_Don’t ever underestimate the young and the angry. We will surprise you every time._

Wanda moved her hands to Pietro’s face and kissed him soundly. He was the other half of her heart and he was nigh invincible as long as he was careful. There was a pride there between them that had only ever existed before in much smaller increments, now exponentially widening every day that they remembered just how powerful they had both become. The Maximoff twins had always had the heart and the strength of their convictions, but now they had the physical and mental power to actually make the difference they had wanted to see, to ‘be the change’ and all. She pulled away only slightly, resting her forehead to his and reminding him in every non-verbal way possible that they were one, they were inseparable and that there was no force strong enough to keep them apart.

“And you had better return to me, faster than I imagined.”

Pietro grinned an earnest, unguarded smile that was both for her and the sheer glee of the moment. They were finally here. It was finally time.

“But of course – who is faster than me?” he sauntered backwards a few steps, grinning smugly before raising a finger to point at her, “And I mean it, I love the dress. Beautiful.”

Grinning, Wanda watched the silver blur of her brother disappear out the doorway and into the distance in but a blink, her heart swelling.

***

Just the fresh air alone invigorated Pietro unbelievably, every atom of him buzzing with mounting adrenaline as he burned a path through the snow and out across the railway. The world around him moved with an almost slovenly slowness and it might have been annoying were it anything other than trees and the somehow beautiful winter landscape of the Sokovian forest. It was still and silent in this portion though the sounds of the nearby battle were growing louder every moment, any wildlife that he might have glimpsed otherwise having fled the scene the moment the bombs started going off. Among the increasing sounds of shells and bullets came that bone-chilling scream of something massive, something hell-bent on pure destruction.

The Hulk.

Though the line-up of the Avengers team had remained fairly static since the New York incident, Pietro and Wanda had taken extra time to acquaint themselves with as much personal detail surrounding them as they could get their hands on. Von Strucker had authorized their usage of computers and have even ordered in smart phones for the twins to use to acclimate themselves with the current technology. Sokovia was more than slightly behind the times of the Western world in terms of technological advancement, but they were young and smart and it hadn’t taken either of them long to figure out how the damn things worked – though they did have to have the casing specially made on Pietro’s phone to withstand his speed as the first two literally came to pieces in his pocket and the flying debris at such a velocity had nearly killed an attendee. How undignified it would have been for that poor guy to be killed by a flying touch-screen sensor, Pietro had marveled with some degree of amusement since he hadn’t. The twins might have understood the necessity of sacrifice, but neither of them believed in mindless death, least of ways of their own citizens. Nonetheless, he knew where the team was likely to be located – coming in from the northwest quadrant as there would have been ample landing space for a quinjet  in the lower quadrant but an attack from the northwest would be unexpected – and who was likely to be leading what charges – Stark was whizzing about the castle like a high powered gnat, Hulk would be destroying bunkers, Thor would be taking the high points and the two super spies would probably be in vehicles, along with Captain America.

Much to his surprise, he spotted movement behind a set of trees that suggested someone on foot. Moving too quickly to be seen clearly but fast enough to throw off some noise and attract attention, Pietro knew that he would have to play and time this display just right if he wanted to keep the element of surprise. Steadying himself behind one of the trees, he waited for the fraction of a second when the target behind the tree turned to his side, his bow poised, and fired an arrow towards the bunker ahead. _Hawkeye_. Pietro took a moment to memorize the purple and black pattern before turning his attention to the projectile weapon sailing in a perfect arc towards its target. _Hm_.

Pietro wanted that arrow. It was time to make acquaintances. It was time to show The Avengers what they would really be up against.

***

On her way downstairs, Wanda passed toward a connecting corridor in time to hear Von Strucker being cornered by someone with an authoritative, certain voice - American accented. She paused, considering the plan to just keep moving until she reached her two destinations, but curiosity had gotten the best of her and she crept into the shadowed eave to watch the interaction unnoticed. The man’s shoulders were almost cartoonishly square, big and solid above his trim waist and strong arms. The back of his blonde head was all she could see until Von Strucker turned and suddenly she was staring at the profile of Steve Rogers, War Hero. Captain America himself. Though she never lost sight of exactly what he represented, she had to admit that he was almost breathtakingly beautiful.

_Such is America_ , she considered, _Perfect aesthetic, absolute moral indignation, understanding absolutely nothing about the world around them. Captain America is a perfect metaphor indeed._

The Baron knew she was there. His eyes never gave him away, but he began to angle himself in such a manner as to show Wanda that he knew she was in the dark corner and was trying to give her a clean shot. There was a momentary conflict in her heart; on one hand, she had never been of the inclination to call the guy Uncle Wolfgang and commit herself to caring for him on a personal note, but on the other, he had given them this opportunity with every bit of wisdom and resource he could have scraped together, and even when it had hurt them direly, it had been solely for the purpose of their enhancement and survival. He had spent the last few months making sure they were well fed, well clothed and relatively well-adjusted. From what she could tell, he had taken good care of Ballato as well, making sure the praise for his two lead doctors and their teams was well heard across the compound.

The man was no hero himself and surely his own heart was lacking in compassion, but he had integrity.

Wanda could respect that. Perhaps they didn’t have much compassion anymore either, herself and her brother.  

When the opportunity presented itself, she slid from the shadows with her eyes shining red and struck like a snake, winding a quick bit of disorientation into the head of the famous American legend. He smelled like man-sweat and gunpowder, odd but not unpleasant, and she took the moment to notice the cornflower blue of his eyes, somehow completely different from Pietro’s despite the similar color. There was a brief moment as she backed towards the door where she cut her gaze over to Baron Von Strucker, somehow instinctively knowing this would be the last time they looked at one another. If the Avengers took the castle – as it appeared they most certainly would – Strucker would be NATO property by sundown unless he was killed in action. They would escape the way they had planned to, and as they locked eyes, she knew that he had known this all along. Still, there was no trace of bitterness in his face or his thoughts, only pride.

_Go_ , he told her in that instant. _Go and thrive._

_Goodbye_ was her only whispered reply, the sound a soft echo inside of his head, and the doors closed behind her.

From there it was a short walk down a winding staircase until she reached the entrance to the laboratory wings. The medical staff had signs hung in most areas that instructed them to gather here in case of an emergency, and Wanda could think of nothing constituting an emergency more than the Avengers laying siege to the castle. She expected a hustle and bustle of scared voices, hushed whispering to greet her when she punched in the code and came through the door, but the other side was eerily silent. Frowning, Wanda paused to focus before she pushed the door open – from what she could sense, there were very few active minds on the other side. Perhaps most of them had pre-planned escape routes and had made for the hills as quickly as possible.

Perhaps not.

Wanda stepped into the lab atrium that led into the webbing of hallways that had been used to observe them in their cells and found that, indeed, there were very few active minds on that side of the partition. The rest were dead. Their mouths hung slack, a greenish-white foam around their gaping lips, eyes rolled up into their heads and bodies still limp and rapidly cooling. There was the faint scent of bitter almonds in the air: cyanide, for the Hydra purists that either didn’t see or didn’t want another way out. Her heart quickened as she caught herself scanning the dozens of dead for a familiar face, and indeed a few of the attendees were ones she was accustomed to seeing. There were a few she knew by name. However, neither of the doctors were among the dead; she continued on to find a group of scientists and medical staff huddling in an open office around the desk that Istvan usually sat at.

“Dr. Ballato?” Wanda asked, looking around in search of her.

They all exchanged ashen looks, shaking their heads and turning back to her before their attention snapped to someone in the doorway behind her.

“Get out,” Istvan ordered to the group, pointing down a hallway with authority he rarely showed, “There’s an unguarded exit that leads out towards the railroad tracks. Flee on foot to the city and get on trains. They’re destroying the research as we speak, we will try to buy you some time.”

The staff scurried around Wanda quickly in a lemming race to escape, no one hesitating to take the directions. This left her standing across from the man she once knew as Serge, his face somehow so much more worn in the year they had spent here with him. She did not know him as a comrade per se – that illusion had been shattered by his active deception – but she had never seen a dark underbelly that she had been expecting. Serge was a man committed to the project, by whatever means necessary, maybe even out of dedication to his country. Maybe Istvan and Serge were the same creature after all, at least in some ways.

“She’s not here. She escaped when the attack began.”

Flooded with relief, Wanda let out the breath she didn’t realize she was holding.

Istvan held out a brown leather wallet with his right hand, the left clutching a pistol. Wanda paused, considering that she might have to defend herself but for only a moment as Istvan shook his head. She sensed no malice in him, only resignation.

“Take this. You and your brother will need money to hide while you plan.”

The meaning was implicit – _you still have a mission. The Avengers still exist_. Wanda nodded, her big eyes fixed on him as she reached for the wallet, plucking it gently from his hand. He studied her for one last time. He had seen Wanda Maximoff go from a starving, frail girl into a strong, fierce young woman and perhaps what astounded him the most was that, in either state, he never believed her to be anything other than utterly capable. As a doomed child, she had taken her place as a leader in a revolution that would have frightened away most adults with its dire risks and responsibilities. As a young woman, she had survived the impossible to become the unimaginable, and he felt firm in his assessment that he had been absolutely correct all those years ago when he looked at the twins and thought, _they are the ones. They will do it._

“You and Pietro need to get out of here,” Istvan warned again, his voice dire but gentle, “You are both still wanted by the government, but the other revolutionaries believe you are dead. Be ghosts. Bide your time until your opportunity arises, and then strike with the memories of us from the commune.”

Wanda arched a brow slightly, her mouth hanging open by small degrees, “…the revolution died, Istvan. _Serge_.”

“Yes,” he responded almost reverently, the small bittersweet smile on his face peculiar here and now as his dark eyes glinted slightly with tears, “…but I never stopped believing in it. Or you.”

He raised the gun. Wanda closed her eyes.

“Long live the Maximoffs.”

“Goodbye, Serge,” she whispered.

Though she was expecting it, the bang and clatter of his body hitting the ground made her jump.

***

Avignoine and Ballato had been among the first wave of escapees, though it had taken some prying on Avignoine’s part to get her to leave. By Leslie Ballato’s account, they deserved whatever they got in that castle, be it the Hulk bringing down the ceiling on all of their heads or NATO frog-marching them onto prisoner convoys. She informed him as much with her voice barely controlled; she might have believed they deserved retribution, but it didn’t make her any less afraid of what shape that retribution might be taking. Ballato didn’t want to die. Fortunately, Avignoine had been able to appeal to that and dragged her to her feet and out of the spillway towards the forest and, maybe, freedom.

There were shouts of alarm and panic as the dozen or so of them began running with all they had, arms pumping and feet sometimes stumbling in the snow. They had barely made it thirty feet when Ballato heard the first CRACK of a shot fired, one of the attendees at the head of the pack going down in a bright crimson splash across the pure white ground. She yelled hoarsely, almost stalling until Avignoine grabbed for her hand and screamed at her to keep running. They clutched at one another until their knuckles turned white and they could feel their pulses throbbing beneath the skin, running for their very lives.

The sniper on the roof squinted into his scope, snarling to himself. The Avengers were coming, everybody was going to die, yadda yadda yadda. _Amateurs_. Why the organization had insisted on hiring people who had never been under forcible siege before in their lives, he’d never understand; it wasn’t like there was a shortage in third world countries. The two enhanced hadn’t run like fleeing pigs when the walls began to shake. Hydra had no use for the weak of constitution, especially those who might fly the coop when the time came to commit fully.

“ _Und_ down.”

He adjusted his scope.

Ballato only heard the throb of her heartbeat in her ears now. She didn’t hear the second CRACK or the strangled sound of impact, but she felt the hard jerk of Avignoine’s hand being ripped from hers as he hit the snow, blood splashing out a red gash ahead of him. She hadn’t heard it, but she knew he had been shot. Avignoine was dead. She didn’t look back.

The sniper adjusted his scope again, taking aim at the back of a dark head.

Ballato kept running.

***

When Wanda had first laid eyes on Tony Stark himself, she had been so overcome with conflicted emotion that her hands had trembled. There was an ages-old hatred renewed into blinding light at that moment along with the knowledge that one glorious, devastating act could unravel him completely as long as she maintained his not knowing she was there. She could pop into his mind and convince him an atom bomb with his name on it had gone off, that his beloved partner was dead at his hands, or that his own friends would kill him when he inevitably fell from their good graces. There were so many options. The monolith of war and destruction itself had walked in before her, and she could not think fast enough of how many ways she wanted to destroy him.

And then he turned, talking to himself or perhaps his AI, and she caught sight of his face: weary, worn. He didn’t look like an unruffled movie star or the greasy-slick prince of the mega-death industry; he wasn’t perfect and airbrushed or villainous in his very air. Something that felt sick settled in the pit of Wanda’s stomach as she watched him walk around the room, waiting like a coiled snake for the strike but somehow feeling less certain of herself than she did before. He had made them suffer. He had killed countless people. He deserved to be made accountable, yes. He deserved to suffer in return, without a doubt.

But what stood before her was not the concept of war or the devil himself with dollar signs in his eyes. What stood before her was a rapidly aging middle-aged man who looked as though he didn’t sleep very well last night or the night before that. He might have been a war profiteer but he was, as Alyosha had once said of all harmful humans, ‘people, too’.

He was just a man. How disappointing.

But there would definitely be something inside of him to work with, and the part of her that barely kettled her rage was dying to get her little red hands on it.

***

By the time Pietro returned to the castle, he found Wanda standing in the shadows and staring intently at the man ahead of her as he raised a hand to call for the pieces of his suit that would allow him to bare-handedly take the scepter from its place. His back was to them as he stood, unaware of their presence and informing the others that he had the job done. His voice was concise, his words quick and efficient as though he weren’t even capable of second-guessing himself. Even alone in this room full of dark, awful nightmares, the man had a presence. He carried himself with an assuredness that seemed completely foreign – Pietro couldn’t place ever having seen someone appear so confident before in his life.

There was only one person this could be, of course. His blood nearly boiled.

Tony turned, scepter in hand as he cut a beeline back towards the way he had come in. Despite all this bravado, though, there was a haunted look in his dark, tired eyes. The iconic stylized facial hair, his head full of dark waves peppering with gray, his shoulders broad for a normal man but nothing standing next to the Captain – it was all there. All he needed was a three piece suit and a martini in one hand and the image would be picture perfect, except for something that lurked behind those eyes above the growing bags of fatigue. Fear. Horror. The rest of the presentation might have been utterly impeccable, but his eyes couldn’t hide that something had rattled Tony Stark mere moments before.

Pietro felt a swell of pride towards Wanda in that moment, though he was confused as to why he was making such an easy escape with the most valuable item save themselves in the compound.

“We’re just going to let him take it?”

When Wanda raised her hand to his chest in response, Pietro turned to look at her and saw the wide, awful, beautiful grin across her mouth as his answer.

All he needed to do was trust her judgment.


	8. Precious Memories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _They always had hope. No matter what else had been taken, the commune never lost its hope. Even standing against a wall with guns in their faces and only seconds left to live, he knew without a doubt that each one of them held hope in their hearts until the second they stopped beating. They died in the name of a revolution that wasn’t even real by a government that never planned to let them survive it, but they had died it believing with all their hearts in what was right – and no bullet, no police officer, no public office would ever take that away from them._
> 
> _The unrivaled beauty of that fact took both of their breaths away, and they again reached for one another’s hands as they stood before the monument to their failures and their successes, so deeply awash in gratitude they could never find the words for it._
> 
> The calm before the storm, or the opportunity that Wanda and Pietro have been waiting for from the moment they both realized that what existed between them defied the conventional bounds of brother and sister.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is more smut here than you can shake a stick at, so if that's not your bag... re-evaluate why you're reading this, I guess? IDK. Whatever way you spin it, lots of smut. 
> 
> We're nearing the grand finale, folks, so enjoy this reprieve before the shit really hits the fan. 
> 
> As always, thank you so much for the kind feedback, kudos, etc - I can't tell you how nice it is to see that the story resonates with people. I wanted so much more of a backstory for the MCU Maximoffs than we got in the movie, so I decided to be the fic I wanted to see on the internet and it's a really good feeling to know that other people dig it too. Everyone's been so incredibly kind despite that this is a pairing that tends to draw a lot of animosity. Thank you very much. :)
> 
> Also, this is the longest chapter thus far, so get a drink and a comfy chair or something.

They were free.

For the first time in perhaps their entire lives, Wanda and Pietro were beholden to no one and nothing. The Avengers had taken the castle and raided it of anything that once was their ‘normal’ life for the past year. The commune was a long passed memory. They had been cycled out of the Sokovian government’s most wanted lineup, mainly because most intelligence sources suspected the Maximoff twins had slipped out of the country to escape persecution. They had attempted to spin this angle to the public at large to undermine the faith in the revolutionary twins by showing that even they had fled their own movement in cowardice but no one in the commune believed it. The last anyone saw of them was with military police forcing black bags over their heads and dragging them away in opposite directions, and given that no one had come back from being taken so brazenly in the light of day, they were certain that the Maximoff twins had been killed. Wanda had taken up reading news stories on the rebellion as soon as she had learned how to use the internet and the browser on her smart phone but quickly stopped – the news media was so wrong about what all had been happening that she could barely stand to read it. No wonder the rest of the world stayed so placated; they were being fed absolute lies.

The feeling was somewhat exhilarating as they walked down to the city square. It was hardly recognizable from what it had been but a year ago – jumbo screens had been moved onto pedestals in the cross sections of the much cleaner, wider streets. Bigger stores had moved in, the small businesses that they had always known having closed their doors under the weight of economic pressure. New neon signs hung bright above their now automatic doors, the traffic lights clearer and brighter now as well. It was grey concrete and steel coupled with flashes of colored bulbs. People hurried past on foot, the Lucite-clear bus stops clean and packed with people. Any trace of Sokovia’s original flavor, their real culture was gone in a flash of modern-age news scrolling. Despite this, the graffiti of Iron Man with his AK47’s and dollar signs remained perfectly untouched, perhaps recently re-painted onto a covered up wall.

Capitalism had won. The city looked like a poorer, smaller version of Times Square, which was far more metropolitan than anything Pietro and Wanda had ever seen with their own eyes.

Disheartened but not defeated, they walked hand in hand down the main strip and up the sidewalks where the chain-link fences had been improved but still gave a grim reminder to the reality of the city. Pietro had the hood of his track jacket pulled up, Wanda’s black scarf wrapped around her neck high enough to casually cover her mouth if she kept her head dipped just right. Fortunately, no one was looking at the two kids for long, an occasional passing glance at the silvery ends of Pietro’s hair or Wanda’s dress and jacket was the only inspection they caught. Ahead on the left was the church – sacred to them now for so many reasons – and she felt Pietro squeeze her hand softly as they passed. Wanda couldn’t help but give the dilapidated building a reverent stare, remembering how it had felt that night on a cold floor when Pietro pushed into her and past the last barrier between them, the taboo that had kept them from breaching into absolute oneness utterly shattered in a moment of hopelessness that blossomed into something holy.

She pulled his hand up to her mouth and kissed his knuckles softly, and she could see his smile without even looking at him.

They walked in mutual silence for another mile or so, down the winding side streets that they used to know as home, the veins that lead them back into the chambers of the commune’s beating heart, the fallen hotel. Without speaking the words, they both knew that was where they would be going; reports and information were one thing but seeing it for themselves was something neither of them could pretend they didn’t need. Wanda had informed Pietro about Istvan’s stage-left exit on the trip down, the world a blur around them as he carried her in his arms and sped away from the castle and the invading forces at a speed unknown to anyone but them. This too felt oddly intimate – being swept up in his arms and moving so fast she could feel the g-force against her face, pulling back her hair if she didn’t bury her head against his chest just so. It was just another way in which the twins were in a world unto themselves, only more literal now. Pietro hadn’t been surprised about Istvan, maybe a little sadder than he’d have imagined. It was that ugly ache of nostalgia that sometimes brought him back to the pictures of the commune in his memory, back to the time when Istvan was Sergei and nothing more than a disparate youth pleading with Pietro about humanity.

The times, they had changed.

Despite all the advancements made and how slick and shiny the city’s center had become, the wealth had not reached all corners of Sokovia just yet. The brick darkened with mold and dirt on the buildings they passed in such a gradual fade that one might not have noticed immediately that they were leaving the cosmopolitan part of the city until it was already too late. The older shops had closed down, boarded up their windows and left signs on the fogging glass. The street traffic was more aggressive and less polished, a few beater cars on the street sides revving their failing engines futilely as men shook their heads and stood over their open hoods, their smoking innards. The smells were sharper – garbage and oil and piss and steam – and suddenly, they were home again, standing near the foot of what was once upon a time supposed to be a crown jewel in the “new” Sokovia’s rejuvenated social scene.

It had once been bustling and alive with promise and possibility. Then, it had fallen victim to the times, abandoned and losing its pristineness and gloss by the moment as the decay of age and neglect took it over. Despite this, it had risen from the ashes as a dirty, unkempt phoenix – the home for the urchins and kids of the revolution, the once grand rooms becoming the hosts to the young and idealistic, the kids with nowhere else to go. They had sung protest songs in its halls and bedrooms and lobby. Kids made friends and made out and fucked and fought and cried together safely in its broken down, welcoming walls – they were imperfect and broken and so was it. There was an understanding there, a respect that stood unreplicated and never would have worked in any other setting where the parties involved weren’t both busted down to their base elements and desperately trying for survival.

It was clear now that the old hotel had withered and died without the life force of the resistance going strong inside of it. It had never looked more like a corpse than it looked then, an empty shell that had once housed a life so robust it could only be remembered in short flashes of nostalgia and a feeling that the world was hanging on a precipice that could only be saved from plunging over by exerting as much force in the opposite direction as possible.

It was one of the saddest things the twins had ever seen.

Their hands tightened on one another’s and they stood for a long time in mutual silence before Pietro tugged at her slightly, signifying that no matter how awful the truth was, he intended to go inside. Wanda almost hesitated, glancing around to ensure that no one was watching – the last time they had seen this place was over a year ago and it had been crawling with police at the time, so perhaps it was simply the muscle-memory of anxiety telling her they were being watched – before darting along behind him, dodging the crumbling stones in the entrance stairs and dipping into a shadowed eave with unpracticed but natural stealth.

Inside, it smelled as damp and dusty as it always had – nothing had changed much in that respect – except that it was missing that one vital human component, the scent of life in the air stirring the staleness away with movement and body heat and smoke. The staircase they had walked up so many years ago was crumbling as though it had been hit with a projectile weapon, and Wanda realized with a tightness in her throat that there were bullet holes in the wall ahead, running a fairly even line about nine feet in length. She didn’t have to work hard to imagine it as the image came to her unbidden: the young people, some crying and some still snarling against their captors, lined up against that wall with the cold certainty that they were staring down their deaths. Police raise their guns with deadly efficiency and fired against a rising of screams, the bodies of human beings barely more than children crumpling to the floor. Their fear was so palpable in the room that it left a permanent mark on everyone there.

“Wanda!” Pietro hissed a whisper softly, turning to see why she had stopped.

Her eyes glowed crimson as she stared at the wall and his mouth tightened into a line. Artfully, he darted back down and tugged her hand with gentle insistence yet again, “C’mon.”

Pulling from the unwelcome nightmare, she turned and kept her haunted eyes on the cracks in the staircase until they had made it safely to the top, her brother’s hand tight in hers the entire time just in case she would need to be pulled away.

There was next to nothing in the once bustling communal hallway that suggested life had ever flourished there – some old newspapers and garbage lining the halls, probably from the few vagrants who were brave enough to take up in this haunted place. The mural of Tony Stark seemed untouched, just covered with dust and age and fading in what was once its beautiful color, on the wall across from what had been their bedroom. Wanda stepped ahead, eyes fixed on the memory come back to life before her until she slowed to a stop before it. This mural had been part of their history as though it were a sentient life all its own, the legacy of Alyosha on the wall that always served to remind them who the real enemy was, where this fight was ultimately to be aimed. It had given her every bit of rage she had needed to survive in a place this dark, the token they both needed to remain focused enough to live to fight another day.

Wanda consolidated that image, that zeitgeist with the newly acquired memory of Tony Stark himself in the basement laboratory at the castle mere hours before. How different those two things had seemed; how odd it was to see a devil made flesh and be made aware that no matter the evils he might have visited upon her own life or the planet itself, he was still a person. Tony Stark was still a meat-covered skeleton propelling itself forward on the strength of its own ideas of purpose. Even more complex was the reality that she knew him now: Wanda had been inside of his head. She’d seen the weakness that stood at the forefront of his mind – a failure to protect his friends and the planet as he stood helplessly by, watching it all unravel in his hands – and used it against him. She had shown him his dead friends, his horrible failures. She knew that despite all the complexities of their relationships, Steve Rogers meant something particularly special to Tony, not only because of who he was as a person but more because of what he represented as an idea – what he made Tony believe he could be. She knew he held insecurity by the metric ton.

She knew Pepper had left him. He wasn’t telling anyone, but he was alone again now. The woman whom had taken over his company and anchored him into his spot had decided she’d had enough. Though finding the scepter had given him a momentary boost, she knew that he felt more like a failure now than he ever had before in his life. She reached into his brain and saw bottles and bottles of scotch and the soft, cosmopolitan legs and arms of women and men around him and though she could not deduce if they were recent memory, she knew he was struggling to keep his head above water.

He would sink himself. All they would have to do would be watch.

Pietro stood behind her and studied the mural, his thoughts very much the same in essence as he watched Wanda disappear into her own head with them. Somehow, the fact that Stark wasn’t a devil had made him all the more abhorrent – _how could you be a human being and still do the things you have done?_  The mural had been a talisman for every piece of planning they had ever done in these walls or otherwise, and it would be burned into his vision for the rest of his life. He would always remember Tony Stark with blood dripping from his hands and flames behind him, no matter how many times he saw him standing there like a normal person with a normal heart. Turning away to check what had once been their bedroom, he glanced around and then ducked his head into the open doorway, remembering the first day they stood there as he watched Vanya climb up onto a ledge to hang another blanket over the cold window.

Wanda heard his breath hitch and felt the start of his heart in her own, her attention now captured.

“What is it?” she asked softly, reaching out for him even as she rounded the corner next to him, always seeking the anchor of his flesh.

Pietro’s blue eyes stared across at the wall between the two windows. It had always just been a blank expanse of dirty stucco and wood, nothing special in the scheme of the hotel. Now, along the baseboards, were piles and piles of long-dried flowers – some tied with string and looking like little more than hand-picked weeds, others like bouquets from the florist shop that had once traded grocery vouchers in exchange for the tulips the younger kids would scout from well to do lawns near the capital circle. Pietro could make out the familiar petals of a cluster of long dead tulips, their petals paper thin and drooping gray from decaying stems. The stubs of melted candles formed a puddle of marbling wax on the floor, strings with what looked like dirty beads hanging near them. Offerings: the altar beneath the masterpiece.

On the wall above, in that blank space they had stared at a million times as they tried to sleep, was a mural of the twins themselves.

Wanda’s long dark hair was painted in flowing cascades, whipping around her as if blown like wind. Her dark eyes were only slightly more cartoonishly large than they were in reality, rimmed in black paint to emphasize them, the glint of white paint in the iris making them light up from the inside. Her hands were clasped over one another against her chest, her bony shoulders and sharp cheekbones a reminder of just how gaunt she had once been compared to the healthy young woman she had become. Beside her was Pietro, his signature smirk tugging only lightly at the corner of his lips as he angled in towards Wanda, both of them peering out from their makeshift canvas as if they could come right off of the paint itself and be born into reality. He too looked thin, his hair whitish tangles with dark roots, the exaggerated curve of his sad-dog eyes circling a piercing shade of blue. Below them was the stylized, beautiful calligraphy that spelled out the message in a cartoon banner.

**_LONG LIVE THE MAXIMOFFS_ **

Beneath the image were messages scrawled in permanent marker. _Pietro and Wanda will live FOREVER. The revolution will not fail you. Remember Pietro. Remember Wanda. Remember Alyosha. Remember Vanya. Remember Serge. Remember your own soul. Love will conquer in the end. Have faith in yourselves and one another. We will see you at the finish line._

_Long live our brother and sister._

Wanda felt the air escape her chest as she stared, eyes flooding with tears. Pietro was already crying silently, his face stoic and unmoving even as tears fell in streams down his cheeks (she had always envied that ability about him, she was such an ugly crier). That puckered scar that rested over his heart, the mark left behind by a bomb stamped STARK and two dead parents and watching his sister slowly starve over years before the chance for rescue came, ached with a vengeance unknown to him as he considered the facts of the situation. Most of them had not survived, he knew that much. He had seen the bullet holes and chosen to walk past them in that moment. The revolution they were supposed to lead had died here in this hotel, but it had died with hope.

They always had hope. No matter what else had been taken, the commune never lost its hope. Even standing against a wall with guns in their faces and only seconds left to live, he knew without a doubt that each one of them held hope in their hearts until the second they stopped beating. They died in the name of a revolution that wasn’t even real by a government that never planned to let them survive it, but they had died it believing with all their hearts in what was right – and no bullet, no police officer, no public office would ever take that away from them. 

The unrivaled beauty of that fact took both of their breaths away, and they again reached for one another’s hands as they stood before the monument to their failures and their successes, so deeply awash in gratitude they could never find the words for it.

***

In a high end hotel suite overlooking the city square, Wanda and Pietro shared a bottle of top-shelf vodka and watched the cars and people below. The multitudinous lights made it seem so alien – Sokovia was always so low-fi in the grant scheme of things, not quite Serbia but not the heavily westernized Turkey either. Pietro was discovering, unpleasantly at that, that his increased metabolism meant little to no buzz from alcohol, even the expensive kind. Wanda nursed the same glass for an hour, never having had the wherewithal to drink as heavily as she might have liked. They sat on the ledge at the window together in serene silence, the weight of the past always at their backs but not resting on their shoulders.

Pietro had to convince Wanda to splurge a little, citing their recent trials and tribulations as reason enough to indulge and driving the pitch home by reminding her that it wouldn’t cost them any money if they played their cards right. Though she was incredibly nervous, Wanda straightened her posture and strolled to the front desk, claiming a reservation for a high floor suite under the names Kuba and Lorya Mikanovic and handing them a Polish credit card under those names. Istvan-Serge had prepared them fully: the wallet contained several nations’ currencies and cards, all burner accounts with Hydra funding behind them in private banks. When she was certain no one but Pietro was watching, her eyes flashed crimson and she wound a vision into the clerk’s head of pre-paying for an entire week, a business trip upon which they were not to be disturbed. The plan went off without a hitch and they were escorted to the room, the one bag between them that had been slung over Pietro’s shoulder going to the floor as soon as the door clicked shut.

There was a good few minutes in which Wanda refused to do anything but stare around the lavish room. As far as luxury suites went it hardly placed against its American competitors, but for two Sokovian orphans it was a deluxe at Trump Tower. There was a separate sitting room with a lux couch and large, flat television – which was a luxury the twins had almost never been approximate to as their parents hadn’t been keen on TV to begin with – and the bed was gigantic and clean, covered in a fluffy white comforter and a smattering of mints on the pillows. The bathroom was clean and lovely, fresh flowers in a vase on the counter and the largest bathtub either of them had ever seen on one side. The sterile showers at the compound had been nice, but neither of them could remember the last time they’d even seen a functional bathtub.

Wanda found herself starting to back out, insisting that there were kids that were hungry and filthy in the commune that could have used these things more than them. She opened her mouth to vocalize her protest when she stopped, the heavy weight of remembering back on her tongue as Pietro turned to share her gaze, her very sadness. They weren’t there. They were all gone. It was all over. Now, it was time to keep their eyes ahead and move forward, and there was nothing to do but relish the moment until the moment had passed and it was time to hit the pavement again.

“We earned this,” Pietro had reminded her, coming to brace his hands on her shoulders as he dipped to kiss her softly, “We survived. Just enjoy it, yeah? Who knows when it will happen again.”

Twenty minutes later, they were in the window with the vodka, having eaten all the peanuts from the mini bar. The comfortable silence had given way to discussion of how they’d have to buy a change of clothes or two, whatever they could carry without too much trouble. Wanda would need a purse, Pietro would want a backpack. They both lamented the loss of the small shops as buying from a large chain was still anathema to their ideologies, no matter what all had changed. Pietro assured her they could probably find things on the internet, have them sent to the hotel as long as they were there. Wanda reminded him that it was much easier for men to buy clothes without trying them on than women. He conceded, rising to put the vodka bottle back. Fruitless.

“Pietro?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at him.

“Yes?” he answered, fishing around to look for anything else that might be interesting and noting with pleasant surprise that there was chocolate.

“How long has it been since you’ve had a bath?”

“Just what are you trying to say, Wandika?” he teased, but he had caught the change in her tone and the glint in her eye as she smiled at him.

***

Somewhere in New York, Tony Stark was asking Bruce Banner to help him initiate the Ultron project using the scepter.

Natasha took the time to mull her situation. Clint made covert phone calls. Steve checked in with Sam and again, received nothing in the way of good news. Maria managed the chaos of the team. Thor found Jane if only for a night.

Tony went back to his suite alone and wished he could drink himself to sleep on something strong enough to erase the vision of the team, dead and dying on some alien rock as Steve Rogers called to him to ask the child’s question of “why?”.

The Iron Legion slept diligently in their compartments, waiting to be awakened for duty, the last of the Sokovian mud washed from their hulls.

Everyone took deep breaths. No one knew that these were the last days of the air as they knew it.

***

Truly, neither Wanda nor Pietro could remember the last time they’d had an actual bath in an actual bathtub, much less the last time it had been together. Their parents had pictures of the two of them in a tub at the old farmhouse, their grins bright and their eyes wide as they played with little plastic block letters, spelling out gibberish against the shower wall. They used to bathe together routinely until they were maybe eight or nine, perhaps too late by a lot of cultural standards but not particularly concerning in theirs. It was both saving water and time. Pietro had often wondered if it was this act that lead to the less-than-culturally-accepted feelings he developed for his sister; their emotional closeness wasn’t jarring to anyone, but as they grew older and girlfriends and boyfriends suddenly became a thing of interest, he realized that it probably wouldn’t go over very well for him to reveal the only girlfriend he actually wanted was Wanda. At that age, a boyfriend or girlfriend was a societal token of maturity – you held hands and talked on the phone if both your families had one or sat next to each other in class and during breaks and shared your snacks. All those things, he already did with his sister – what more was there to the whole boyfriend and girlfriend ordeal?

Of course, he knew now exactly how much more there was to the notion of a romantic relationship. Granted, he’d never actually been in one with anyone else and could scarcely pinpoint the moment that his relationship with his twin sister undertook those tones, the whole thing feeling stupidly reductive anyway. Chicken, egg, sister, girlfriend – who cared? Not Pietro, least of ways when their worlds were destroyed and the only thing they had was one another. The thoughts about whether this was right or wrong occupied approximately no space in his waking mind anymore and given what they had been through together, he could hardly imagine anybody else could do differently in his situation.

Besides, this was him and Wanda. It was different anyway. There was nothing else like it, so there was no one else who could understand it.

A vial of some sort of shimmering liquid sat on the rim of the tub and she had taken a deep smell of it – violets, maybe? – before smiling to herself and pouring it in. Pietro had watched her with a soft smile, relishing the deeply strange but very uplifting moments of what he assumed was traditional normalcy they had been treated to since their arrival. The room filled with a delicate perfumed scent like light flowers and the tub filled with fluffy white bubbles. Wanda had run the water so scathingly hot that she had to switch the faucet to cold just to make it safe to enter. When they finally found a tolerable medium, they both sunk in at opposite ends, feet and legs brushing against naked flesh and sending goosebumps of excitement across the both of them as they tangled their legs and reclined, sighing almost simultaneously.

“You good?” Pietro asked after a moment, cracking one eye open to peer over at her with a smile.

“This is oddly Freudian,” she responded dryly, running one hand up his calf innocently just to feel the hairs on his leg wave in the water, “But yes, I’m good.”

He gave another deep sigh, finally having slowed down enough to relax for the first time in… well, probably years. He chewed his lower lip absently, considering the wide open road before them. It was oddly tempting to think about throwing in the towel on the whole destroy-the-Avengers thing, to just take their new abilities and travel the world together. They could see the parts of the world they had always wanted to see but never thought they would: Indonesia, Cambodia, Russia, Greece. They had a map as children that they would mark with places they wanted to go. Neither of them ever brought up how they had circled America three times. They could run forever – _he_ could run forever, with Wanda in his arms.

But he knew there was still a growling, raging thing in the pit of his heart that lived in Wanda’s as well, and that thing would not know satisfaction until it knew justice. That was the picture he looked at every day, just to make sure neither of them lost sight of the ultimate goal.

The considering of this ruined his relaxation for the moment, so Pietro rose up a bit and shifted, moving to get behind Wanda so that she could recline back against his chest. The warm, wet of her skin was delicious against his in a way that was so much more than sexual; it was the purest sense of comfort on the planet. There was nothing that could bring him back to the moment the way being pressed against Wanda could, no matter how fast he was moving or how far he was going; the anchor they both used to maintain a sense of placement in a life spent adrift on stormy seas was the mere touch of one another, even just as innocuous or innocent as his hand in hers. Wanda sighed happily and rested her damp head back against his shoulder as he moved his arms to drape idly along the rim of the tub. He kissed the back of her head, drifting off in thought before closing his eyes and deepening his breaths, moments passing into minutes.

“If we aren’t careful, we’re going to fall asleep in here.”

Her voice was a tired croak but never less than music to Pietro’s ears.

“Don’t fall asleep in the bathtub,” he cautioned without opening his eyes, smiling against her hair, “I have plans for you when we’re out.”

She rumbled a soft laugh, shifting her legs, “Oh? Then we might want to get out now because in five minutes I’ll be sleeping like a dead thing.”

The stirring between them began at a low simmer the way it always did. His rough hands dipped below the surface to brush across her stomach and up over her breasts, never tiring of the way they felt under his palms. Wanda moaned softly, shifting back against Pietro to feel where his cock was stiffening slightly against her lower back.

“A real bed?” purred his voice in her ear as he dipped to bite the lobe gently, “No guards, no staff? Nobody to hear us. Loud as we want.”

Her eyes fluttered open. This would be the first time they were absolutely free with one another, no time restraints or worries about being noticed. Even with their granted private visits during the last leg of testing, Wanda hadn’t fooled herself into thinking they weren’t being monitored in at least some ways. Masturbating mutually and communicating through a wall or a psychic link had been a decent substitute but there was nothing like the real thing, being able to kiss and bite and grab Pietro and smell his skin and his sweat. The very thought was too good to be true and too tempting to keep waiting. Pulling away and making him groan in irritation, Wanda took a moment to dip back down under the water and relish the slight sting of water that hot against her face.

***

Somewhere out in the world, Baron von Strucker thought of the twins and smiled, alone in his transport cell.

***

Neither of them bothered with the fluffy white robes hanging on the back of the door though they were both dying to put one on – there wouldn’t have been much of a point.

The lights were down everywhere but the lamps in near the bed, giving the room a relaxed glow unlike any place they’d slept since childhood. The white comforter was unbelievably thick and soft, the bed like melting into a cloud to the point that they weren’t entirely sure they would be able to sleep on it for lack of familiarity. The television remained ignored, their cell phones still in the bag with their few belongings (no point in checking them, the only contacts saved on them were one another). There was nothing to distract them from the task of learning one another intimately with the leisure and privacy they’d never had afforded to them before.

Wanda’s breath came in short, soft gasps, her fingers tangled in Pietro’s damp curls as he kept her thighs pressed open with his hands. He’d taken a few opportunities in the past to go down on her but they were rarely more than fleeting ventures into totally foreign (and totally amazing) territory that had to be cut short for the sake of time management. It had never been enough for either of them; he loved the way she tasted and the way it felt and the absolutely mindblowing noises it made her make, the way her hips rocked against his mouth or how she pulled his hair and whimpered, tremors jerking her abdomen above him. It was something he had thought about all the time after he’d listened to the other boys at the commune talk about ‘eating pussy’ and after he’d finally gotten brave enough to try it, the fixation had only gotten worse.

This? This was perfect. Wanda was laid out on an exquisite bed, damp and smelling like violets and arousal, in no hurry whatsoever. His fingers dug gently into the softness of her inner thighs to keep her spread for him; he’d spent the first few moments opening her with his fingers with the most careful delicateness and finally getting a good look at exactly what had been driving him crazy all this time. He had seen plenty of women naked in the flesh between the commune’s sexually liberal populace and the few porno mags that had ever passed his way, but there was a big difference between airbrushed photos and nude women walking past you and actually getting the up close and personal view of a woman’s sex. Again he thought of the floral shop – one of the girls from the commune had waxed poetic about how vaginal flowers were if you looked at the composition closely. The metaphor had made him roll his eyes and he would never speak it out loud to Wanda lest she scoff, but he understood the comment a lot better now at least. Whatever the case, he hadn’t been able to only look for long.

This forum of absolute freedom let him spend more time exploring, tasting every part of her even before he’d made his way down. Her breasts were sensitive and amazingly soft, her pale nipples stiffened under his tongue. Soft kisses and bites down her stomach had her shuddering and gasping. But this was exactly where he wanted to be, with his tongue in her folds and licking the length of her softly as he relished the salty-perfect way she tasted. He nuzzled into the soft curls, moaned into her, took the time to experiment with speeds (never using the newer options as he had learned a very, very valuable lesson with his own genitals in that regard) and techniques (according to the guys at the commune, the alphabet was a stupid urban legend and thusly a bad idea but the paintbrush-stroke maneuver worked wonders – he found this to be more or less the case). He kept his eyes closed awhile and listened to her moans, let the sensations guide him as he ground against the wadded up bedding for some sort of relief, then he kept them open for a while and watched the landscape of her belly shift as she writhed and wriggled. The tandem of the noises she was making – obscene and beautiful and a fucking hallelujah chorus – and the way she tasted and smelled – salty across the expanse of her slick flesh but sharper, tangier when he put his tongue inside of her – were robbing him of any sentient thought outside of the pursuit of pleasure, his and hers. He only _kind of_ knew what a clitoris was – thanks again, commune talk – but given how she kept arching to keep his mouth over the little nub of flesh somewhere near the top, he wagered he’d found it.

Wanda was seeing stars by the time she got him to stop exploring and focus on making her come, a flush and a fine sheen of sweat across her face and chest. This was unreal. She came when they had sex – not every time, but most of the time – and chalked it up to beginner’s luck initially but what she gradually came to suspect was that they were simply biologically made for one another, the curve of his hips and hers fitting concave to convex in all the right places so the friction when he pressed deep into her and ground them together it took little else to get her to the metaphorical mountain. However amazing that was, this was another thing entirely; the hot wet of his mouth on her was excruciatingly perfect and she said nothing as she arched, back curling as muscles contracted, her own mouth hanging open and gasping as it started a crescendo that was familiar and yet unique.

She moaned out loud, the noise feral and unrecognizable as hers and all the more agonizing for Pietro for that fact, stammering out the noises in broken staccato until she came in violent shudders, her legs trembling under her brother’s hands and her heart the running of a jackrabbit against the bones of her ribs.

***

Alone in the dark in New York, Steve Rogers ran his fingers over the creasing photo of Bucky that had been in his file. It was hardly a glamorous or handsome picture, but it was at least something. The internet had been chock full of pictures of Bucky Barnes, war hero and the Captain’s right hand commando, but nothing he printed from the Google image search nor had sent to him by the Smithsonian felt personal, as if he were asking for pieces of his own heart and memory back from other people and getting glossy imposters instead. This picture wasn’t good, but it was old, and it felt real.

He fought back tears for yet another night, closing his eyes and trying to remember something, anything that could give him solace that wasn’t manufactured from a memory that wasn’t even his anymore.

***

Gathering Wanda up in his carved arms – arms she still could hardly believe were real and relished grabbing, sinking her teeth into with just a little too much pressure – Pietro moved up onto his knees and pulled her into his lap. It was a brief yet somehow not at all awkward struggle of arranging limbs and lining himself up against her slippery cunt ( _holy shit_ she was wet) before they found the harmony to start, the slow drag of him pushing inside of her an agonizing, perfect invasion that made her feel impossibly full. They both paused, catching their breaths and looking at one another with half-hooded, starry eyes, moved beyond the ability to vocalize the intimacy of the moment. It didn’t really bother Wanda that she wasn’t Pietro’s first, at least not anymore, if only for the fact that she knew without even asking that there had never once been anything in either of their lives with anyone else that compared to _this_ with one another. There was no way. There could have never been a bond this deep or want this strong with anyone but each other.

She wound her long arms gracefully about his shoulders, fingers twining into the silvery waves, her mouth somewhere near his forehead as she rolled her hips against his and gasped his name.

The sound made him come immediately, but blessedly, there was almost no refractory period anymore with his newly enhanced metabolism. He only gasped back, stammered in his efforts as he rested his head against her shoulder for only a moment, and then grabbed her thigh and wrapped the other arm around her lower back, starting to rock her back against his still-hard cock.

***

A bottle of century-old scotch sat on the nightstand of Tony Stark’s bedroom. He laid on his side, staring at it intently as if it held every answer without even needing to be consumed, his dark eyes glittering in the low light.

He was getting so, so tired of always feeling like he was losing. He was even more tired of pretending like he never lost at anything. Pride forbid him to take the kind of accountability he always knew he needed to take, and distractions like drinking and excess or more recently the Iron Man suit and Pepper kept him diverted enough to keep that ever-present, underlying truth at bay. Now, he only had the one thing – being Iron Man – and the projects – god, the projects – to keep him somewhere between the safety rails that he had spent a lifetime scraping against and testing the strength of. The awful truth was that he was lonely; the even more awful truth was that he was no longer able to ignore that he was beginning to feel his age.

_You’re not getting any younger. Don’t you think it’s time to find a way to bow out?_

Though he’d never admit it out loud or show how upset he was – Tony kept his cards close to his chest on reflex, even with those he loved – the Ultron project had been a huge disappointment for him, and Tony didn’t handle disappointment well. Instead of acquiescing to defeat, he had formulated a plan that he hoped beyond hope might resurrect his masterpiece from the ashes. If Ultron came to be… there would be no battling anymore. No more being tired, feeling the injuries that never stopped nagging and now were even harder to shake. No more complex maze of morality to navigated for every action. No more life on the line every time the earth shook.

No more feeling helpless when he looked up at the sky. No more panic attacks.

No more being so broken that he had become completely unlovable. Maybe Pepper would come back if Tony could conclusively step away from the superhero life.

He didn’t touch the bottle that night, but he wanted it so badly he could nearly taste it anyway.

***

The week went by in a blur of tangled sheets and material acquisition. Their respective enhancements made stealing the things they needed beyond easy – Wanda could convince a shopkeeper they had never been there, and Pietro could grab what they wanted or needed and be gone so fast it didn’t catch anything on the cameras other than a bleeding line of grayish silver in the feed – but they were minimalists at heart and by habit. They had a few changes of clothes and the odd supplies – Pietro picked up bar soap, bandages and tampons without hesitation because, hey, necessity – but little else, preferring to value their portability over all other things. Without a lot to bog them down, disappearing would be that much simpler when the time came. Pietro insisted he could carry more, he always insisted he could do more in general, but Wanda kept her clothing and jewelry limited to the one bag. It made her smile no matter how frustrated he seemed to get: he still wanted to give her everything, and he was willing to carry it for her as well.

Though they wanted to keep moving, they both resolved to enjoy their week of solace in one another before making any moves. After all, Wanda kept insisting to her brother as he buried his face in the sweet smell of her clean hair - when they would look back on this week, they would forever remember the smell of violets and associate it with freedom, with their love - there was nothing to do now but wait. Stark would give them the opening they needed; they just had to be ready once he did. In the meantime, there was plenty for them to do here with one another.

The TV was never turned on once.

They spent long days bleeding into evenings pressed against each other, learning with absolute certainty the curvatures and valleys of one another’s bodies, the touches that elicited the loudest reactions or the strongest ones. Pietro learned to garner more self-control via exposure – even though he hardly softened between orgasms, he found his were far more intense if he could hold off on having one as soon as the urge arose. Wanda always came quietly, gasping with an open mouth and shuddering taut against Pietro. Her moans were plentiful and musical, but when she started getting close, they became less and lesser so, as if her entire being were channeling all its energy into that one moment of exquisite blindness. He watched her face when she came and fell in love with her all over again, every single time, losing his breath as he asked in their native tongue how on earth she was so beautiful, how anything on this earth could ever be so beautiful.

Pietro was loud, all sharp inhales and growling through his teeth, grunts and whimpers that made him seem sometimes wild and sometimes as domesticated under her will as a dog. The first time Wanda moved to take his cock into her mouth, he hesitated and reached for her shoulder as if to stop her; though he’d always desperately wanted to know what it would feel like, he somehow felt as though the act itself were degrading for a women, some long-kept memory of listening to boys talk about being blown by girls – and always as though they were somehow obligated to do this somewhat impractical thing that seemingly held no benefit to them whatsoever - that spent years turning into a resistance to the notion. Wanda only paused, eyes inquisitive, before she dipped down to run her tongue along the impossibly soft skin, closing her eyes and moaning feather-light at the taste and smell of him. He spent the first few minutes of this encounter terrified, holding his breath and only half feeling anything she was doing until he allowed himself to look down at her, observe her actions and her body language. Much to his surprise, she didn’t seem repulsed or as though she were only doing this as reciprocity for how often he spent with his face in her cunt – quite the contrary, she seemed to be enjoying herself greatly.

It only took a few more times before he could relax enough to really enjoy it, and dear god, did he really enjoy it.

The communication between the twins had always been mostly non-verbal, and this was no different. They tested boundaries, explored fantasies with the greatest trust possible in one another. Pietro took Wanda from behind as they both stood at the window, watching the city lights sparkle and flash below, the glass cool against her palms as he kept her back against his chest. She loved that as well as lying face down with him pressed against her, sandwiching her between his hard body and the mattress with his hand trapped beneath her hips, grinding into her and in turn grinding her against his palm. She rode him hard and fast on the couch, her hands braced hard on his shoulders as he sat against its back, breathless and watching her with absolute adoration. They fucked and laughed and napped and ate and fucked again, sometimes not even making it to the bed and rubbing carpet burn into their backs and shoulders. Wanda lit candles and they spent hours in the tub, slick and hot and utterly free to do nothing but divulge in one another.

Pietro loved having his hair pulled and being bitten, and she obliged him in every possible way, fingers in his curls more often than not and mapping the expanse of his body in pinkened bite marks that might have bruised were it not for his metabolic enhancements.

Wanda bruised. Her milk-white skin bore bluish finger shaped bruises in constellations on her hips, the insides of her thighs, the side of her neck. Pietro had been horrified when he first saw them, a sick feeling hitting him right in the gut but Wanda only smiled wryly, insisting that she liked seeing the marks like a road map of where his hands had been. It mystified him, and though he obliged her with gusto, he always stayed careful and diligent, making sure she never seemed even vaguely uncomfortable. He feared hurting her, but Wanda insisted on more, harder, faster until they found the exact friction of perfection between them and he perfected the tempo needed to make her come so hard her legs would shake for a half hour afterward, what would make him finally lose his tight leash on control and follow her.

The way his skin tasted with a faint sheen of sweat, the way their breaths blended into the same damp air passing from one set of lungs to another, the way their hearts beat in that perfect cadence of synchronicity until there was no denying logically that they shared the same one with some invisible red thread tight between them - this was an education they had both longed for but never expected to receive. All those years ago, they had feared it. In the compound, they had felt as though they’d never have the time and the safe space to pursue it. Yet here in this hotel, they had both found it.

After the fifth or so day spent in this manner, they both lay in a damp tangle in the white sheets, wet hair sticking to one another’s skin and breathing evening out to something resembling normal. Pietro’s mouth curled into a soft smile reflexively, the tips of his fingers dancing whispers of patterns across the back of Wanda’s shoulder. Her arm was slung across his middle, her face buried below his collarbone, contented in a way she had nearly never experienced.

“S’perfect,” Pietro breathed out, returning to normal more quickly than she was able to but still looking hazy, pleased and fucked-out.

“Yes,” she returned softly, her voice hoarse but not at all unhappy.

A few minutes of pleasant silence passed before Pietro tilted his head to look down at her, urging her to look up at him. The mere sight of her blinking sleepily up at him set a smile across his face, fingers deftly sweeping away errant hair.

“We must have a plan, yes? I’d love to stay here forever, but we must get up eventually. We have that whole destroying-the-west thing to do, still.”

Wanda smirked against his skin, pressing a gentle kiss to his ribs and sighing, “Yes, just that small matter to attend to.”

Shifting, she moved to cross her arms over his chest and rest her chin on them, the sheets moving with her.

“I have trust in what I saw in Tony Stark. He wants out. He is desperate. He will do something irrational and arrogant, and when it happens, we will exploit it. No way to plan for that just yet, brother.”

Pietro’s expression darkened at the mention of Stark but only a fraction, choosing to keep his thoughts on how dizzyingly beautiful Wanda was in this moment with her disheveled hair and flushed face, naked as they day they came into the world together. It had become easy in this week of almost alien living to imagine what their lives would have been like had they been born to privilege; leisure time spent together, expensive schools with vast educational options, fine food that made them healthy and happy and a sense of security unchallenged by falling bombs. It was a lovely picture, but it was as false as the flowers in the vase near the door, the possibility for anything but the collision course they were on as dead as a doornail. They were not meant for that life. They had come into the world together and he was still certain they would leave it much the same – screaming fiercely and holding tight to one another, covered in someone else’s blood.

“It’s hard to plan for ‘eventually something will happen’, Wandika,” he responded softly, a lover’s purr rather than a counterpoint, stroking his fingers along her hair, “I lack your gift for foresight, you see.”

“You always did,” she countered wryly through a voice just as affectionate as his, “This is why I make the big plans, yes?”

Pietro’s smile spread into a grin. She could be better at him than anything in the world and he would never feel an ounce of jealousy, only pride. He could only ever be proud of her successes – they only ever made one another better through them.

“Yes, that’s why you make the plan, sister.”

***

The plan was still an abstract concept when but a day later, both twins received a text message from an unmarked sender bearing only one message.

**_THE CHURCH. TONIGHT. THE OPPORTUNITY OF A LIFETIME_**.

The course of history was set in motion.

 

 


	9. No Kings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The moment everything turned was both as unpredictable and inevitable as the twins had anticipated. Ultron initiated the fight, taking off with Stark in hot pursuit as Pietro started his assault on the remaining team members and Wanda took to the shadows, trying to find the most covert ways to reach her intended targets. This might not have been the Hulk or a bombshell in her face but it was certainly dangerous, that much she knew; while the Avengers on the whole towed the company line of trying to avoid bloodshed where they could (which was a laugh in and of itself, especially considering Romanoff and Barton), there were those (the aforementioned, mostly) who wouldn’t hesitate to put something sharp through her face to save their own lives... Wanda was completely vulnerable, only able to have faith that her mind-bending would render the target helpless with enough time for her to escape and move on to the next. It required great faith - faith that both Ultron and Pietro had in her._
> 
> Ultron, enter stage left. Wanda and Pietro begin the descent into those final, chaotic days before the city they loved was lifted off the ground and the courses of their lives are changed, yet again, forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies yet again on the delay - I know I mentioned last month that I started a new job, and as of this week I've already been promoted which means more money (yay) and more responsibilities (boo). I am also preparing to move at the end of the month, so a lot going on IRL. That being said, we're hitting the wind down now - I'll be finishing this series this evening and posting the final chapter and the epilogue over the next two weeks. 
> 
> Thank you so much to those of you who are still reading this thing, who still take the time to message or leave kudos, and thank you to those who don't as well - just the fact that you're reading this gives me a lot of happiness. 
> 
> Enjoy - and fasten your seatbelts. We're almost there.

Of course, Ultron changed everything.

Wanda had been almost enraged by his choice of venue. The church was holy to her and Pietro without ever glimpsing upon religious reason; it had been the site of where they had chosen to accept the hand fate had dealt them in every possible way. The crumbling floor before the holy seat had been their altar unto heaven and had bore witness to the shattering of the taboo that had kept them from being wholly together the way they both knew in their bones they needed to be. It had been a symbol of their enduring strength, a strength borne only of their unity – a unity that gave them the fortitude to face down whatever hell was barreling toward them. It was the birthplace of the union they now knew both in spirit and body. It was where this new _they_ had begun.

And of course, someone wanted to come and put their own mark over it.

Pietro had been tense, reasoning that the only reason someone would have chosen that particular location was if they knew. He was well aware that neither himself nor Wanda had told anyone about that night – its intimacy was too precious to share with the rest of the world – but given that his sister could now communicate with him telepathically and peer into people’s minds at will, nothing was outside of the realm of possibility. Wanda secretly hoped it was Dr. Ballato, somehow guessing correctly at their location and coming to tell her that she was still alive. She didn’t share this hope with her brother, already convinced she’d have to mourn its loss and unwilling to visit any more useless optimism on him than he’d already had to endure. They both came to the structure armed to the teeth with defensiveness to spare, ready to destroy this interloper if they weren’t as useful as they were implying they’d be.

‘Useful’ didn’t really do Ultron justice. He was a living, sort-of breathing bastion of possibility hand-delivered by Stark and his stupidly reckless good intentions. The irony that Tony had given metaphorical birth to the very thing that would in all likelihood destroy him was delicious, but while Wanda reveled in it with wild abandon, Pietro seemed more reserved about his faith. Ultron had his heart – or rather his lack thereof – in the right place, maybe, but he was striking back with the petulance of a wronged child, and Alyosha’s long-gone advice of how the master’s tools would never destroy the master’s house kept ringing in his ears. Still, Wanda seemed to know more than Pietro about what was at play beneath it all, and he did his best to trust that they would not be misguided if she was so certain.

Not to mention that it felt eerily similar. Though both Ultron and the twins themselves had spoken about their desire to rid the world of the Avengers for the welfare of the world itself, all three of them were taking aim with the fires of hell raging in their hearts. The big metal pontificator could go on at length – and dear god could he go on at length, he would have made a hell of a public speaker in Pietro’s estimation – about his desires to create ‘peace in our time’, but despite his not having an organic body or any of the trappings of a standard human being, it was personal for him. Just the same as it was personal for the twins, Ultron was striking back from a place of being hurt.

This made Wanda more sympathetic to him, at least at first. It just made Pietro feel like they were placing too much faith in what was essentially a young person who was just really, really mad at their dad.

But Ultron did something that no one short of Pietro had ever done, at least verbally: he acknowledged Wanda to be the most dangerous of them all. That felt good. Years of being underestimated as dirty street orphans and then as punks raging futilely against a system that wasn’t even acknowledging them until shots started getting fired meant that, while they considered themselves independent of the need for approval of their peers, praise that high would immediately strike a chord. And again, Pietro was proud – Ultron knew that Pietro himself was a force to be reckoned with and hadn’t sold him short, but to hear from the mouth (or mouth-like interface) of a third party made it an entirely different thing.

They would hurt the Avengers, but Wanda would destroy them from the inside.

And whether Pietro felt Ultron’s motives were as grandiose as he claimed, he couldn’t deny that the robot had everything he needed to accomplish the goal long set before them.

***

Both twins had wet, teary eyes when they reached Johannesburg, departing the carrier jet to blink into the glaring sun when suddenly the rush of air unlike any they had ever known filled their lungs. They could taste the ocean, even this far away from the coast. Even the sun itself shone differently here. The twins had dreamed of traveling the world as children, and now they would have that opportunity even if it meant they were likely barreling down the path to their own imminent destruction. The unspoken reality between them was that this was something they were prepared to do in so long as they could do it with one another; the notion of a long life had never been something either one of them was cruel enough to suggest. The revolution in Sokovia had been a to-the-end sort of mission, and this one would be no different.

This knowledge made the moment all the more poignant as they stared across at the African landscape, nothing more exotic than an airport hangar but so much more, so very much more than either of them had thought was possible for them to see.

Ultron had a plan, as usual. Wanda had her own plan of course, but the two seemed to match more often than they didn’t and both culminated in the ultimate goal of destroying the Avengers and releasing the planet from their tyranny, so there wasn’t much questioning to be done (of course there was no way either could have known what he was ultimately angling toward, at least not yet). Ultron spoke to both of them directly, looked them in the eyes with the red fiber optics that would have been his own eyes, treated them as equals and perfectly capable threats. It did a lot for their confidence as a unit. Not to mention that he had been the first person(ish) to get them directly to where they needed to be: standing in front of the Avengers.

By the time that moment had come, they had been trading mutual excitement and rage until they were both brimming and could barely contain themselves for the requisite witty banter pre-battle.

Ulysses Claw had broken the news that Von Strucker was dead, a fact that neither twin found alarming so much as just surprising. Sure, he was a sitting duck for a lot of different agencies and individuals, but surely his research and successful experiments would mean his knowledge was worth keeping around and alive. Apparently not. Somehow this fueled them, the memory of everyone in the commune and then the castle driving them into singularity with one shared thought, one piping-hot protest chant that never stopped drumming in their ears with the flow of their own blood.

**You did this to us**.

When Stark stepped forward in his gold and red suit, it was much easier to reduce him back to the mural on the wall. Wanda couldn’t see the deep bags under his eyes or the weariness in the ever-deepening lines in his face. Even though she could still practically taste his insecurity and doubt from her brief time inside of his head, when that mask came down over his face, he disappeared into the persona the public had built for him. Here, he shone so brightly she could see how he had bewitched an entire nation into supporting him and his righteous, clever alter ego. Directly beside him was Captain America, whose own righteousness nearly blinded Tony’s into absolute obscurity, whose very body language and speech carried a certainty and ‘goodness’ about it that had they not been armed to the teeth with their own righteous fury Wanda and Pietro might have hesitated before it. The man had a gravitas, that was for certain.

This was it.

Pietro could think of nothing else as he stepped forward, the moment he’d dreamed of with spite and vengeance since he lay pressed against his sister under a bed, staring at the shell that set this very chain of events in motion. This was a weapons manufacturing plant hidden cleverly inside of this ship, after all. How fitting. It fell into the sequence of events he dreamed of: he threw out the line. Stark responded. Tony Stark, alive and in the flesh and somewhere inside of that stupid suit had to look Pietro in the face and acknowledge him. Given that staring with passionate rage into a faceless mask or pane of glass was old hat to the twins at this point, it wasn’t much of a disappointment to not be able to look him in the eyes – they knew that cowards always hid their faces.

He had spoken words into Tony Stark’s ears and Tony Stark had heard them and responded. Even if it wasn’t the most hateful thing he could have thought of to say or the tearing-down he had always dreamed of given the war profiteer, it would suffice because it had bridged the gap, built the link. They were no longer connected without Stark’s knowledge – now they were inextricably bound on this collision course. That satisfaction rode with Pietro for miles, all the way through the ensuing banter (most of which he hardly even heard, so lost in the power of this moment) and battle.

Wanda kept mum, observing. The spies were on the loose, no doubt – she had caught a brief flash of red hair from the corner of her eye when they were ascending the catwalk. Wanda wondered why someone whose trade was to blend in so well chose such an auspicious shade for their hair. Naturally, Dr. Banner was nowhere in sight. This was well enough, all things considered – he was to be last after all – but she knew that the archer would be the hardest to reach. The Demi-God might have more fortitude than the rest but if the things Wanda had learned about his stubborn pride were any indication, it wouldn’t take much to bypass it (though she had to admit to herself, she was a little nervous that it wouldn’t work). Bruce Banner was the only one she was intimidated by and for the obvious reasons – there would have never been a moment in her life of more clear and present danger than standing before the Hulk except the initial bombing itself.

The moment everything turned was both as unpredictable and inevitable as the twins had anticipated. Ultron initiated the fight, taking off with Stark in hot pursuit as Pietro started his assault on the remaining team members and Wanda took to the shadows, trying to find the most covert ways to reach her intended targets. This might not have been the Hulk or a bombshell in her face but it was certainly dangerous, that much she knew; while the Avengers on the whole towed the company line of trying to avoid bloodshed where they could (which was a laugh in and of itself, especially considering Romanoff and Barton), there were those (the aforementioned, mostly) who wouldn’t hesitate to put something sharp through her face to save their own lives. Unforunately, Wanda’s abilities dictated that she had to get within striking distance to be most effective at interfacing. Pietro had the upper hand in all aspects: he could strike and then be gone before his target could even hit the ground or evade any incoming attack with plenty of time to spare, but Wanda was completely vulnerable, only able to have faith that her mind-bending would render the target helpless with enough time for her to escape and move on to the next. It required great faith - faith that both Ultron and Pietro had in her.

Faith that Wanda had learned over the years to have in herself, and in spades at that.

Steve Rogers had been the easiest to crack into as well as with the most obvious weaknesses and flaws. The man wore his heart on his sleeve, albeit quietly, and kept very few secrets from himself or anyone else. Perhaps there was much he wasn’t saying – in fact, Wanda was sure there was, some secret longings and sad realizations near the forefront that took no effort to peer into – but it wasn’t out of deception. Rather, no one had bothered to ask. She felt the cold chill of ice and saw the impact, the glass from the front of the aircraft coming in at him in a wave followed by an impossibly dense wall of snow. He had died then, she knew – he had died a normal, human death. His whole world had gone from a phone call to a woman he loved and respected with the whole of his heart as that same heart pounded hard with animal fear at what was coming to the pitch black of being killed instantly, slammed into the ground with unimaginable force. That feeling rattled Wanda for days after the fact, the knowledge of impending death, seconds to live before the unavoidable end; she thought of Steve Rogers crashing that ship and the kids in the commune being lined against the wall, staring down the gun barrels that would kill them only seconds later. How horrific.

Wanda left Steve to his warped memories, his fears that the war he fought was in vein and the lasting memory of a woman named Peggy. She saw Bucky, knew what Steve felt for him and what seeing him again had done to the soldier – how simple would it have been to twist a knife into that raw, beating space in the Captain’s ribs and bring him to his knees? – but she just couldn’t make herself do it. He might have represented something awful, he might have been part of a system that needed destroying, but underneath his misgivings about his country, he was a good man.

Furthermore, he was a good man in love. Wanda knew how terribly, horribly vulnerable that made someone. She couldn’t exploit it, not here, not when she too understood just what it meant to love someone in a way that’s still so forbidden.

She hoped maybe that kindness would come back to her in some way, her act of sparing Captain Rogers that particular hell.

Of course, it didn’t.

***

Wanda felt like her very insides were on fire, the burning in her skull amplified by the glaring sun as she bent forward, putting her head in her hands and groaning. She could feel her boots sticking in the mud, her skin sweaty and miserable under the leather of her jacket. Africa had definitely been on the to-do list, but dear god, she hadn’t considered the logistics of a leather jacket in this kind of weather. Among other logistics not considered: some sort of electrified arrow stuck straight to her forehead and rocking her down to her very toes. The skin was tender and burnt where the pads had connected and she hurt all the way to the ends of her hair, trying to blink away the excess water in her eyes as she felt Pietro’s fingers tenderly graze away the stray pieces falling into her face and matting against her sweaty forehead. His touch was the only thing that brought even the vaguest comfort.

“ _Wandika_ ,” he urged softly, barely concealing the worry in his voice that bordered nigh on trembling rage, “I will kill him. You wait here.”

That goddamn archer had fired his last arrow as far as Pietro was concerned. There was a penalty to hurting Wanda and that penalty required more blood than a mere human being could give and still survive. He’d deal with Stark and the rest later, but Clint Barton needed to die right the fuck now. That thought curling darkly in his heart, Pietro took to his feet and was nearly gone before Wanda grabbed onto his hand, shaking her head and giving him the only pause he would accept in this moment.

“No,” her voice broke, her anguished eyes cutting up at him, “I want to finish the plan.”

As she caught her breath, she looked away towards where the quinjet had stood previously unnoticed, the figure of Bruce Banner wandering out in confusion. Pietro could feel his sister’s determination, that sleepless anger that lived inside of them both reminding them that pain was temporary and part and parcel of this life they had chosen. He shivered at the sound of the resolve in her voice.

“I want the big one.”

***

There was an odd duplicity to Bruce Banner, Wanda quickly noticed, even odd in the sea of duplicities about a man with a split personality that literally transforms him into a monster. Even though he was by and large the greatest force to be reckoned with on the Avengers team when green, he was also the most fearful by nature. Half his mental composition was molten, boiling rage, a sort of primordial anger that seemed ancient in stark comparison to the rest of him; this part, Wanda could identify with. There was so much hatred in her own heart that she often feared it would eclipse everything else and suffocate out the compassion she had been able to hold on to tenuously with fragile fingers, eyes always on them for signs of weakening. However, the other half of Bruce Banner was comprised of timid, ever-trembling fear, also bordering on primordial in its rawness; the half of Dr. Banner that was accountable for suppressing the Hulk was also at any given point doing its best to suppress absolute pants-shitting terror at the reality of what he had become. Some of that fear, that nervousness had been with him since well before the incident that made him into this dual-headed beast he had become, his nature that of a man who would have otherwise never been courageous enough to join in with a superhero initiative. The Hulk was a roaring inferno of pure Id-level destructive rage – Bruce Banner was a man who had been too afraid to ask for what he wanted for the duration of his entire life. Up until the two forces collided, there had been next to no room for anything but doubt in his heart.

Now, that fear was focused almost entirely on keeping the boiling kettle of the Hulk from spilling over, twisting the doctor himself into his own form and using hands that were once bound only to discovery and advancement to wreak utter destruction down upon whatever poor city or town he was near. It had once been limited to worrying about work, about failing at scientific breakthroughs, about whether or not he would ever have the courage to ask Betty to marry him when he knew her father hated him so much, if he’d make a good husband, if he’d fail as a father. If he became one, how on earth he could impart enough wisdom to aid someone in growing up when he barely knew what he was doing himself?

Wanda wanted to dig red talons into that part of him and shake his shoulders, tell him that the big secret she had learned from digging into everyone’s heads was that absolutely _no one_ really knew what they were doing, not even Tony Stark, not even Steve Rogers. Everyone was making it up as they went and trying to do the best they could by the guidelines they felt were best. There was no litmus, there was no correct model to run the experiment of being alive against. There were paths that divulged into forests and oceans that with but one hastily made decision would alter everything forever, and there was no way to know which was which.

There was no way to know that the school report you were agonizing over one day would be rendered completely irrelevant by a bomb in your kitchen by the next.

It occurred to her in that moment that the Avengers would likely hate them, herself and Pietro, without ever truly understanding them.

That made her so, so angry. Angry enough to abandon that moment of empathy and instead weave the darkest world she could conjure into Bruce Banner’s head as she undulated her fingers near the messy spray of graying curls at his crown: a nuclear power plant near a major metropolitan area in America, the Hulk overtaking Banner and smashing into the facility, crushing its very structure and setting off screaming alarms and red flashes for only those few precious seconds of panic before a white light and then…silence. Screaming, and then silence. Silence that saw for miles and miles, all trees lying parallel to the earth in a devastated backbend and nothing alive or moving in the immediate vicinity. She showed Bruce what it would look like when The Hulk hopped into the center of the city, the absolute devastation of buildings reduced to nothing and those that had survived marred with the shadows of fleeing humans, who were no more. Other bombs would then begin to fall, retaliatory for those that had been set off in the confusion about an attack, and across the globe the Hulk would find nothing but the same everywhere he went. Humanity, glassed down to near nothingness, because of him. Because of his failure.

Wanda watched as Bruce’s eyes turned green, fear marking her own face as she quickly severed the connection between them. Before she could even turn her head to call for Pietro she was already moving, caught up in his arms as he sped for the nearest safe spot beneath the hulking ruin of a ship run aground. His arms still around her protectively, Pietro whirled around to a stop and they both watched in a mix of fascination and abject terror as the figure of Bruce Banner in the distance dropped to his knees, crying out in an agony that suddenly grew so much louder, so much larger than a man could ever sound. The transformation was quicker than they would have anticipated, and the moment the giant green behemoth rose to full height and threw an enraged punch at the bow of another ship, they both ducked down lower reflexively. Neither of them noticed immediately, but when their hearts began pounding harder nearly into their throats, they both realized they had been holding their breaths.

“There he goes…” Pietro murmured softly as Hulk bounded up and away towards Johannesburg, his tone murky with confliction, “We did it.”

“We did,” Wanda responded softer, panting and squinting as her head was still killing her.

The Hulk was set upon Johannesburg. There was the sound of screeching metal somewhere in the distance and a faint sound that might have been groups of screaming people. The twins’ heart(s?) sank. Ultron had explained that this was a necessary evil to accomplish what needed to be done, and while the Wanda and Pietro of the commune would have resolutely dug in their heels and refused to be part of such a plan, the rules here had changed. Much more was at stake. And, as they again came to the realization in that moment, they had changed too.

People would die because they had to in order for more people to live free.

They both silently wondered what Alyosha would have said.

***

The twins had been teary-eyed when they arrived in Africa, but when they reached Seoul, Wanda openly wept.

The city was beyond her wildest dreams of beauty, from the colors to the voices and the faces of its people. There were concurrent lines between it and Sokovia, and she was certain if she looked hard enough she’d find those same lines in nearly every city, but it was at the same time so magically different and distinct from anything she had ever seen with her own two eyes. Sure, she had flashes of big cities and faraway places from those whose minds she burrowed through – the flashing lights of Tony Stark’s New York City, slices of urban Paris from Dr. Avignoine, the rich earth colors of Edinburgh from Dr. Ballato – but it was another matter entirely to see it with her own two eyes. The hand that wasn’t attempting to catch her tears was quickly taken by Pietro, who kissed her knuckles as they stared across at the medical facility that sat out on the water, their intended destination.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Ultron rumbled softly behind them, turning his head with the faint sound of whirring gears, “The architecture here is amazing. There are so many great places with truly stunning architecture – the Roman ruins, the Angkor Wat, the pyramids at Giza – it really makes no sense why they destroy so much when they build such beautiful things, does it?”

Wanda could only nod, wholeheartedly understanding the sentiment and moved by the sight of the city in a way that even she couldn’t fully understand. Pietro couldn’t understand it either but he kept close to her side, wrapping one arm gently around her waist so she could lean back against him as the craft Ultron had commandeered neared closer to the docks. The city looked so massive, magnificent and sleek against the skyline, and his own eyes watered in appreciation for what they were seeing. Maybe neither of them fully grasped the invisible pieces moving inside of them, but they at least had a mutual understanding that it was happening and that neither of them could truly know why in this moment.

Wanda and Pietro knew nothing about Helen Cho beyond that Ultron said she had the capability to provide them with a much-needed step in the rest of their plan – building a body for himself. Wanda could see how much he longed for synchronicity with humanity even as he talked it down; he might have seen very clearly the flaws in the systems, but he also envied them. He wanted to take the template before him and make it better, eliminate what had been causing human beings such strife over the course of history. This wasn’t an unworthy cause, and though Pietro still gave it a harder side-eye than his sister, he remembered that this was much the way they had behaved at the commune. Wanda always did have a better scope for the biggest picture of all, and in all the time since their years in the revolution, it had never stopped being that she needed Pietro to keep her anchored. He took great comfort in this fact – some things truly never did change.

Of course, something very big did change, very quickly.

When Wanda had put her hands on that big metal casket and felt the reverberations of a planet being utterly wiped of all its living creatures, the plan had changed on a dime, and suddenly, their greatest enemies were about to become their biggest allies.

 

 

 


	10. Heart Beat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the Sokov uprisings to the human experimentation, from Sokovia to Korea and all the way to the defeating of Ultron and, ultimately, the end. From start to finish, they never had anything more wholly and fully than they had one another.
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> (Credit to user BuckyNatalia for the beautiful graphics)

When Wanda looks back at the events that unfolded over those final days, she wonders how it was even possible that she didn’t know, couldn’t know what was coming. The change was so drastic, so awful that there had to have been some sort of sign, an undercurrent in her senses or some sort of foreshadowing that might have given her enough of a hint to brace herself, to try to alter the coming future. Surely she had been so involved in the fight against Ultron that she had somehow lost the plot, what must have been a glaringly obvious sign from the fates that had passed blindly before her eyes without so much as a notice. Had a black dog crossed their path? Had any teacups fallen from the cabinet? Her mother had held tightly to cultural superstition in the smallest, most unusual ways given how intellectual she was, somehow marrying her lack of a belief in an interventionist God with a deep affinity for crystals and tarot cards, signs and wonders. Their father lovingly teased her but let her be, explaining to the twins that it was important for some people to have ritual, to keep parts of their old faith or their old life with them.

Wanda and Pietro had carried nothing from the old life but one another and fistfuls of nightmares, scars that would never fade and wounds that would never heal save but for through one another.

How could she have not known what was going to happen?

~~~

The flight back to America was rough for several reasons.

Despite the fact that Pietro was far more stalwart than Wanda in hiding the regret he felt over siding with Ultron in the first place, he couldn’t stop vomiting for the first few hours. Even after there was nothing left inside of him and all he did was wretch miserably, it didn’t stop. Steve Rogers eyed him from his seat on the quinjet, offering some sort of medicine that neither twin had heard of; despite Pietro being unable to stop dry heaving long enough to give an answer personally, Wanda waved it away on his behalf. She knew him well enough to know how little he liked medications, especially in light of the last few years. Only Wanda knew that this excess was Pietro’s body attempting to purge him of the chemical flood of regret, anxiety and fear, a fear that no one but her would have ever been able to see in his eyes just the same as no one but him could see her own. She simply stroked her hand over his back and murmured softly to him in their native tongue.

_I love you. It’s going to be okay. We’re going to fix this, we’re going to make it right._

Pietro said nothing but reached for Wanda’s hand, his own trembling from exertion. Eventually he crawled back onto the bench seats and rested his head in her lap, his metabolism allowing him to already be physically recovered but mentally, he was still picking the pieces up off the floor of what had once been his certainty, his resolve. In another life, perhaps he might have blamed Wanda for leading him astray or been too prideful to take his share of that responsibility; not in this one. Pietro knew nothing but responsibility for his own actions, and he knew that his sister had been fooled the same way he once had. Again.

This pattern was making it exceptionally difficult for them to trust their own judgment anymore, an incredibly unsettling fact.

Another hour of silence passed as Wanda studied the side of Steve’s face, her dark eyes crawling the lines as she looked for outside proof of what she knew he carried inside. He was thinking of him right now, the man she had seen in his mind. _Bucky_. He was wondering where Bucky was, if he was alright; it didn’t take a mind reader to catch that much. He had bigger fish to fry but that nagging worry was ever-present, winding itself into his day to day until there was nary a ten minute stretch where he didn’t at least trace his thoughts over the other man’s name. How much he must have meant to him, Wanda considered as her fingers twined absently in her brother’s hair, how very much like them he and this Bucky must be at the end of it all.

She considered not knowing where Pietro was or if he was even alive, and the thought sent such a horrific nausea through her that she shoved it away almost instantly, locking it into whatever vault she could close off at the moment’s notice.

“You know,” Steve’s voice was low but certain, a voice with some authority, “I did the exact same thing as the both of you. I submitted myself to something no sane person would do because I thought I could make a difference.”

Wanda didn’t respond, still trying to gauge what to say when Pietro croaked weakly from her lap, “Yeah? How do you feel about that difference now?”

Steve cut his eyes at the two of them, that cornflower blue like a sky from a painting beneath long, blonde lashes and searched for something he still hadn’t figured out how to verbalize. There could be comradery here, he knew, if he played his cards correctly and made them see that he was right without sending their defensive walls straight back up. Their resistance to the country he represented wasn’t unwarranted; Steve made it a point to try to see both sides of every story and though he knew Tony to be more than a carelessly mass-murdering one percenter, it wasn’t a far stretch to see where that idea had come from and why it was so pervasive for them. Maybe he’d have felt very differently in their shoes.

“Not always great, but it was worth it.”

There was a beat of silence as the three of them contemplated the notion of “worth it”, Wanda wondering what exactly could be so wrong for a man like Captain America. Maybe he wasn’t the stalwart defender of the Western Ideal that she imagined him to be – maybe he wasn’t the human embodiment of capitalism or the joke of democracy that his country had become. Maybe he really was like them, just trying to do what he felt was right.

“We didn’t know,” Wanda nearly whispered, the tips of her fingers playing lightly through the tangles of Pietro’s curls to undo them.

“I know you didn’t.”

Steve wasn’t lying, she could tell that much. He genuinely tried to see the best in the both of them, or at least the most relatable things. He took a deep breath and sighed, turning to look towards the pilots, those eyes ever searching for something unnamable.

“Intention doesn’t negate effect, though. We’re going to have to find out how to undo this, and you’re the closest to Ultron’s plan.”

“He’s going to use Stark’s hubris against him,” Wanda responded plainly, “The same hubris he has in himself. Whatever is in that cradle, he wants to use to destroy everything. We cannot let Stark think it’s a weapon he can somehow use himself.”

Steve’s jaw tightened. Wanda’s eyes flashed over red, but the faintest glimmer. It didn’t take any digging to see the tension there – Tony and Steve were anathema to one another’s personalities, the exact inverse of one another in so many ways. For that reason perhaps, it didn’t take much on Tony’s part to get under Steve’s skin. In fact, if she looked closely enough –

“That’s very rude.”

Wanda raised an eyebrow at Captain Rogers, unsure if she was being called out and perhaps the slightest bit alarmed if she was, “What?”

He cut his eyes back at her, staring for a long moment, “Digging around in someone else’s head. I’d say that’s a pretty big invasion of privacy, wouldn’t you?”

Wanda felt Pietro tense in her lap, his eyes snapping open to peer back at Captain America, undaunted. Insulting his sister was a quick ticket to unraveling the tense weave of common interest they had been building since they climbed onto this godforsaken thing. Wanda smoothed her hand down his shoulder to soothe him, the unspoken words enough to get him to relax only slightly. _It’s alright. I cannot blame him for being upset, and he will not be combative beyond this point._

“It is,” she confessed without much emotion, both unable and unwilling to show any guilt over the action, “But we do things in a war that we aren’t always proud of, don’t we Captain?”

Steve’s mouth tightened again as he thought of Johannesburg. The official reports had listed few to no casualties, likely because of Iron Man’s intervention – a novel, sickeningly ironic thought for the twins – but the destruction had been devastating. The city’s economy would take a significant hit, even with Stark Resilient sweeping in to do restoration project upon restoration project and the United Nations sanctioning support. Bruce Banner would likely be a fugitive, a criminal for what had happened, what little life he might have been able to eke out for himself within Stark Tower and with the team would be gone. They had deliberately made him lose everything he had in the name of revenge. It made Steve angry, true, but he looked across at the two of them there, barely more than kids and clinging to one another like they were all each other had left in the world – and truly, they were – and it reminded him that there are casualties on all sides of a war, often created by one’s own efforts to save the day. She was right – there was plenty to not be proud of. Steve had enough blood on his hands to remind him of that every day, though he did not struggle in the way the others might have. Steve understood balance. He understood sacrifice on a level few others ever would. He understood the gravity of a life taken away.

Wanda looked down at Pietro’s face, dirty and tired and still Botticelli’s most beautiful angel, and spoke before she even had time to worry that she had given too much away.

“Is it not what we love that redeems what we’ve done, Captain Rogers?”

Fear crept up her spine that perhaps she’d said too much, but as she looked across at Steve with an earnest rawness that she so rarely showed to anyone, she didn’t have to do any digging to see the compassion in his eyes. Wanda would come to remember this moment well through the ice-cold pit of her stomach, and beneath that frozen ache she would silently thank Steve Rogers for his mercy every time.

“Yes,” he breathed out softly, “Yes it does.”

***

Vision had turned out to be the wildcard no one was counting on. Wanda felt a kinship with him from the moment he leapt from the metal casket, the kind of affinity she often shared with the minds she had peered into even for the slightest of moments, even though she was distinctly aware that he was not human. He was not human, was not machine, was not organic but was not inorganic either – he was something new entirely. The prospect might have been fascinating had she had the proper time to become ensconced in the thought before a plan had to be set into action to stop Ultron from achieving his plan and destroying the planet and everyone on it. She felt the alarm coming off Pietro in waves the entire time they stood in the glass palace of Stark Tower – he wanted to kill Vision immediately, kill the snake in the egg but she understood that he had a bigger part to play in all of this, a puzzle she hadn’t yet put together.

A puzzle she would wish to whatever gods would listen that she could have gone back and pieced together ahead of time, but she knows it doesn’t work like that. Things just happen. Circumstance dictates, not the sweeping hand of some sort of conscious fate.

The force of Banner’s arm around her neck still burned and she caught Pietro staring over at the scientist with utter contempt when he wasn’t staring angrily at the archer with the perpetual bitter-beer face. By his own estimation, too many people in this room had harmed Wanda and lived; still, Pietro had forcibly grown up enough to know that hotheaded defense of Wanda’s honor was an incredibly poor idea under the circumstances. They had just gotten into a position that more or less aligned them with the people they had tasked themselves with destroying so long ago. Standing there in this opulent monument to Tony Stark’s wealth and looking around at all the Avengers – the mass murdering, Western enforcers with so much blood between them they could fill rivers – felt like an absolute betrayal to everything they had ever been or built, a slap in the face to those pissed off punk kids who agreed to the unthinkable in the name of vengeance.

But the game had changed. The whole world was at stake. Perhaps if they had been nothing but angry brats it wouldn’t have mattered, but there was nothing on this planet that Pietro and Wanda understood more than having to roll with the punches, whether they liked them or not.

Besides, actually speaking with and cohabitating near the others had the unfortunate effect of humanizing them, save perhaps Thor and his casting an imposing figure in a room full of standard-sized people. The moment the demi-god had slammed his hammer into the cradle and sent lightning surging through Vision’s sleeping body, the normally un-pious twins had experienced something akin to religious awe. They both had avoided looking directly at him since, a fact that seemed to evade the Asgardian.

Pietro had been watching Vision peer at Wanda curiously, regarding the act with a small tinge of jealousy and concern, when he felt Tony Stark’s eyes on him from across the room. He paused, forcing himself to turn and look slowly when he wanted to sneak the quickest peek possible to be certain, and locked his piercing blue eyes onto the familiar-yet-foreign dark pits in Tony’s face. He didn’t look like a magazine cover or an awards show presenter. He looked like a tired man approaching the descent out of middle age with all the grace of a prisoner on the way to the gallows. He looked haunted. He looked sorry and proud all at once, like he was caught somewhere between the apology he rightfully owed the two of them and self-affirming pleasure that he had been important enough to mobilize these two children into action. Maybe it was a bit of both. Pietro simultaneously wanted to punch him right in that smug, ridiculous mouth and tell him to sit down and rest, let the others handle this. The last thought alarmed him when he considered that it was Stark that had caused all this in the first fucking place.

Tony turned away first and Pietro felt, for only a moment, as if he had won something. Going to stand next to Wanda and glower at Vision, he pressed his hand discretely to the small of her back, a reminder that no matter what else was happening around them, it was the two of them in the center of the maelstrom the way it had always been. The way it would always be.

***

A room containing several metal lockers housed the clothing and equipment that had been provided for the twins to use during this final conflict. Some of the tech looked far too threatening for either of them to consider learning how to use it in such a tense situation – perhaps if they’d had formal training for weeks on end the way that the castle had provided. The small adjacent bathroom had a mirror, sink and toilet, and Pietro took the opportunity to rub some water on his face and contemplate this entire mess. Wanda took a few steps forward and peered around, unable to resist the childlike temptation to run her fingers over all the clean chrome and blue. A red leather coat was hanging on the back of a chair with a note pinned to the lapel that read “Romanov”. Black Widow’s jacket. Wanda picked it up and inspected the butter soft hide, feeling beneath to find a thin layer of what appeared to be some sort of protective fabric.

“Reinforced with micro-fine Teflon,” came Natasha’s raspy voice as she slipped from around a corner with the kind of agility that made Wanda understand how she had become such a force to be reckoned with, “Stark Industries patent pending.”

Wanda cut her wide eyes over at the redhead, holding the jacket in a sort of uncertainty limbo until the ghost of a smile traced over the Avenger’s lips.

“It’s a little too small for me. Thought I might pass it on to someone who would need it.”

A few seconds of silence passed. To her credit, Natasha didn’t seem uncomfortable in the slightest, holding eye contact without words to fill the space until Wanda finally found the timbre of her voice and spoke.

“…this may be the end, yes?”

Natasha seemed unmoved but nodded slightly, “It may be. But I thought that about New York as well, so my track record for prediction’s pretty spotty.”

Pietro stepped back to the benches, pausing as he glanced between Natasha and Wanda with some degree of apprehension. Natasha gave him the same almost-smile and crossed her arms, stepping back.

“Your comm pieces will be on the quinjet. Wheels up in half an hour. If you have anything you need to do before we leave, I suggest you do it now.”

Though the tone carried the usual Natasha Romanov hint of vagueness, she cast a small glance at the two of them that suggested volumes unto itself.

Wanda barely waited until she was out of the room to turn and kiss Pietro, her hands moving up to his chest and trembling there against him. There was no time for anything else, not if they still wanted to be adequately suited up and ready to board the jet, but he twined his hands into her hair and kissed her back until they were both breathless, their ever-mutual heartbeat quickening between them. There was an unspoken understanding that they were walking into the line of fire, and neither of them had ever been enough of an optimist to assume they were coming back out.

***

They returned to the city of their birth. There was nothing more appropriate and horrifying than this.

The place that spawned them would be the end of humanity, the asteroid impact of extinction coming from the steps they walked to school, the buildings they passed every day. The abandoned commune hotel. The church where they made their first defacement unto the sacrament of what a brother and sister were supposed to be. The castle that made them what they were on that day, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Avengers they had sworn to destroy in order to save a world that had never given them anything but heartache and pain, destruction and uncertainty.

No. It gave them each other. And that was more than enough.

Wanda and Pietro reached for one another’s hands instinctively upon arrival, eyes scanning the city before them in utter disbelief.

“Sokovia,” Pietro murmured softly; he could have said it in his head and she would have heard him regardless, but he wanted to feel the word move across his lips the same way he loved to say Wanda’s name.

It all moved quickly from there.

***

Somewhere across the city, a German man sat in a café, perusing through a magazine in a language he didn’t understand but out of sheer boredom had begun to try to decipher. The man sighed in perpetual malaise, ready for this godforsaken experiment to be over so he could return to his perch on the Alps and never have to so much as smell whatever it was that passed for Sokovian coffee again when the ground began to shake ever so slightly. He watched with muted interest as the ripples in his cup began to grow exponentially until the silverware was clattering, guests exclaiming and rushing past towards the open doorway. Earthquakes didn’t standardly occur here, not this far away from the coast; he was no geographer but he knew that much.

 _Scheisse_.

Standing, he reached for the case that contained the parts of his long-range sniper rifle from under the table. Perhaps it was time to leave Sokovia, with or without orders from the remaining fragments of Hydra.

***

Pietro had always tucked away a juvenile fantasy of running full-tilt through Sokovia, smelling the familiar smells and feeling the cobblestone streets beneath his fleeting feet. He had often dreamed of doing this, reasoning to his waking self that it was just a desire to use his new abilities to re-experience what his life had been up until that point. How differently he could have done things had he and Wanda been born this way, perhaps to parents with these abilities. A psychic mother, a father who could bend elements – no, metal, he had once heard about a man who could bend spoons with his mind. Their father could manipulate metals, use weapons at his whim without so much as touching them. They’d live in a world chock full of people like them and never be outcast for it, all differences celebrated. It would be a world-wide version of what the commune had hoped to build when they had been a part of it – harmony born through the understanding and respect of the differences of others.

But this was of course a pipe dream, one he chastised himself for even bothering to have. Still, it was a nice reprieve sometimes when things had gotten horribly bleak. He and Wanda had almost starved their second winter in the commune along with several others; when he became so hungry that the hallucinations started, it was this that he dreamt of. Perhaps that hope had gotten him through.

Likely, it had been Wanda and Wanda alone that made him survive. And survived they had – here they stood in what might become the last battle of all battles, the fate of the world resting firmly upon the shelf of his shoulders.

Wanda was somewhere else in the city. He could feel her like the throbbing red heart that split itself between their chests, the red aura of her somewhere in his periphery as he went sailing through the onslaughts of metal bodies. Ultron had amassed himself an army of things that it hurt to hit, but there was nothing on the face of this earth that was going to keep him from destroying them, no matter the cost to his own hands or how quickly he seemed to be running out of breath. Adrenaline, he thought at first before he realized just how far up the disembodied Sokovia was rising – the air was thinning. It wouldn’t be too terribly long before they’d be too weak to fight. The clock was ticking, and somewhere out there, he could feel his sister’s fear like metal in his mouth.

Their heart pounding the nearly two decades old cadence of one another’s names was the only sound in Pietro’s ears as he swept through another street, seeing a rising tidal wave of the Ultron bots heading straight for him.

_Wanda. I am coming for you. Wanda._

***

The archer – Hawkeye on paper but Clint now after the way he had spoken to her, the way she looked into his face and saw something close to absolution in that bulldog’s expression – had given Wanda the last piece she needed to rise from the dusty rubble in the hollowed out house and take her place in the Grand Guignol of battle. Perhaps she’d be ashamed later of that moment where she took cover and fear almost overtook her; perhaps she’d look back at herself and try to regard it as if she were a stranger, a nineteen year old girl she didn’t know thrown into circumstances she couldn’t hope to control. Maybe she’d have more mercy for that girl than for herself. Maybe she would never understand how a girl who burned with the fire to save her country and stared down battle lines of policemen was finally overtaken by fear of the world around her. Whatever the case, when she broke through the wooden doors and began her sentinel march towards the church’s last standing bones, she felt the rage she had carried around like a cherished wound festering under her skin for the last near-decade begin to move of its own accord. _Their kitchen gave way, her parents falling through the floor. Pietro was pressed against her on their bed, trying desperately to shield her from imminent death. They were freezing and huddled on the floor of the commune hotel with the empty-eyed mural of a devil she no longer believed to be evil staring back at her from the wall. The pain, the horrific pain of medical torture that paled in comparison to the pain of separation from Pietro. The fight for their survival that began the second they were pulled from the rubble of what had once been their entire lives._

It had been fuel all along, keeping the engine of her heart roaring in her ribs against all odds, and here it had found a home in this last dash of desperation. Power she had never experienced surged through her as she sent waves of red energy towards the metal shells scrambling towards her for their pound of flesh. Ultron favored her, was even a little enamored of her – she knew this without question and had from the beginning, when he first laid his cold hands on her shoulders and told her she was the key, that she was the most dangerous creature there and would destroy the Avengers from the inside. _Beware a flatterer, Wanda_ , her mother had always told her. The extent of his betrayal was surprising but its mere existence? She had long seen this coming.

This was the killing field upon which she’d extract her vengeance.

Neither she nor Pietro had ever entertained that they might live long lives, and they had spent the ride to Sokovia in silent but mutual contemplation of that thought. They would likely die there, together. How fitting. Somehow that seemed less unfair than just the notion of not living to full adulthood. As long as they were together, the end could come as it may.

They had a mission to carry out.

***

Wanda replayed the moment over and over again in her head to the point where she sometimes got lost in it, her heart picking up and her pulse threading as if it were real all over again.

The entirety of the Avengers – herself and Pietro included, they were Avengers now after all – stood protecting the turnkey in the middle of the church. Of _course_ the turnkey would be in the middle of the church; Ultron had apparently made it his mission to appropriate the place away from them without even knowing that for the twins, it was truly hallowed ground. The whole thing was so symmetrical sometimes that it seemed as if it couldn’t have been real – of course the place to guard, the most important thing on the newly island-ed nation of Sokovia was the place that was sacred to them. Coming upon the scene, they had given one another looks that said volumes, a moment of near laughter passing between them until suddenly the challenge was issued and the horde was coming.

Wanda lost herself in the dance, minding only her own steps as she wound energy around her fingers and sent it slamming across metal body after metal body. Pietro was near her; even moving too fast to be seen or somewhere behind her, she never lost perfect sight of him in her mind’s eye, listening to his own jack-hammer heartbeat mirror her own as they fought valiantly. The whir of the Iron Man’s repulsors, the bright light of Vision’s stone, the roar of the Hulk that had once set her teeth on edge all sounded like comfort here.

Pietro had resolved to stay with her when she affirmed that she would be staying behind to guard the turnkey. In the thousand times since that moment that she had thought of it, there was never a single breath that she didn’t spend wishing she had made a different decision. Perhaps if she had let him stay, or asked Tony Stark to guard it instead, the outcome might have been different.

Different in any capacity was preferable to the reality of what had happened.

“Then I’ll stay too.”

Pietro had strode up to her with every intention to kiss her before he paused, hesitating. Their mother’s superstition had never truly left him, perhaps, and while there was nothing he wanted to do more than kiss Wanda, he didn’t want to give the fates any ideas about finality. Kissing was so often for goodbyes, and he refused to give even the illusion that a goodbye was possible even though he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was. Wanda felt the hesitation, eyes catching his, and they both forced back the present fear in order to keep moving forward.

“You know, I’m eleven minutes older than you.”

_I love you, I will love you until my body is dust. I will return for you._

“Go.”

_I know you will. There is no other way for us to be but together._

His footsteps disappeared in the blink of an eye and she turned back to her guard post, her throat tight with the knowledge that no matter what happened here, nothing would be the same again.

And it wasn’t.

***

The end came in a hail of bullets.

Pietro liked to think that he had made a choice, but in reality, the moment he saw Clint Barton turn his back to protect a Sokovian child, it was no longer a choice at all.

Perhaps if there had been more time, he would have worried more about Wanda. What was going to happen to her if he wasn’t around? How would she move through the world without him? Was it even possible for one to be without the other? They had been convinced since childhood that it was not, and neither of them wanted it to be the truth. They had been perfectly content with the notion that one dying meant the other coming with, selfishly perhaps.

The moment he was shot, the only fear he felt was that this would be true and Wanda would die as well. This was the only regret he could have had about this moment: if it had taken Wanda with him.

The bullets tearing through him didn’t hurt, per se. It felt more like a cold chill moving up his spine, the adrenaline spike of being unexpectedly struck searing into the entry wounds so fast that there was no time to register pain. He had precious few seconds as he rattled out a breath, his balance failing him as he stared at Clint and the horrified child, not quite believing himself that anything had happened.

“Y-you did not see that coming…”

Pietro had no idea what death would feel like, but he imagined something more definitive, an old film coming off its reel and leaving nothing behind but blank white screen. The visual popped into his mind and was swept away in an instant by one thought, the thought that carried him to the ground as his heart went stock still.

_Live, Wanda._

The film was off the reel, the screen glowing white, the embrace of the void providing some assurance that on a level he had never been able to contemplate before, everything was going to be alright.

He let the memory of Wanda in his arms carry him home to a farmhouse, set upon fields of yellow flowers, where their parents were laughing in the kitchen.

***

Wanda felt the cold tsunami of sensation up her back, felt the bullets pierce her heart and her lungs and for even just the faintest second, she could feel blood beginning to pool under her dress. For a second, she thought she had actually been shot, that somehow one of the machines had found a gun or one of the fighter planes had aimed poorly and taken her out in the process. However, the understanding came to her in the same blink of space as the sensation that she hadn’t been shot at all.

Which left only one possibility.

His breath rattled in his lungs and caught in her throat, her eyes wide, blood vessels bursting as her hands began to tremble.

_Y-you did not see that coming._

She opened her mouth to call out to him, forgetting that she need only think his name, but by the time she took in a breath, he was gone.

He was gone.

It had happened in seconds, precious seconds in which Pietro was in the world with her and then just as quickly was not.

Her heart did not stop, though she was certain it would.

The goddamn thing kept going.

The ultimate betrayal of Wanda’s heart was that the damned thing continued to beat without him.

She began screaming.

***

Even with Ultron’s disembodied heart clutched tight in her hand until her palm was bleeding around its edges, there was no relief.

His empty shell lay before her, the eyes darkened and the limbs unmoving, and it did absolutely nothing to allay the giant, glacial emptiness inside of her. The air had become so thin she could scarcely draw a breath, beginning to feel lightheaded. _Good._ This was a welcome ending. She would pass out here, die from lack of air and be blessedly unaware it was even happening and it would be seconds, no time at all until she was scorching through the universe on the tail of a shooting star in search of her brother, who was no doubt waiting just on the edge of existence for her. Then, they began to fall. The bus lifted from the ground and she did as well, hair whipping up into the air around her as she felt the drop in her stomach give way to the pull of gravity snatching her and god only knew how many other people back down towards earth.

They had failed.

_Good. Let it end._

She closed her eyes and could nearly feel arms around her, someone pulling her into the sky, and the leap of her heart was replaced by confusion and despair as she opened her eyes against the blur of the air moving past them and saw Vision, his face turned to hers in curious compassion, pulling her away to safety.

Wanda looked back over his shoulder and watched as Sokovia exploded, taking absolutely everything she had ever known with it.

She blinked, and the world was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will be an epilogue in the coming days - it's already written but I wanted to give you guys a little time to digest. 
> 
> Thank you all for taking this fall down the rabbit hole with me - we're almost there.
> 
> Playlist link is here: http://8tracks.com/sugarcrunchbuttercup/i-don-t-hear-the-church-bells-chime-anymore
> 
> It will be posted in the first chapter as well for newcomers, please enjoy.


	11. Epilogue: I Don't Have Anything

**Summary for the Chapter:**

>   
>  I stood on mountaintops that overlooked the world  
> I can’t find anything except a void inside  
> I went to places where I could forget your name  
> I can’t find anything except a void inside
> 
> I don’t have anything, because I don’t have you
> 
> What can I buy to make the sky turn blue again?  
> Where can I go to feel like I’m alive again?  
> Show me the places where I can forget your name  
> I can’t find anything except a void inside
> 
> I don’t have anything, because I don’t have you
> 
> I’ve been stripped of everything  
> Except some flesh that bleeds  
> And I’ve been robbed of everything  
> Except the soul that needs
> 
> You, sweet you
> 
> I don’t have anything because I don’t have you
> 
> VAST, "I Don't Have Anything"  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-98tFjur9b0

They say he is sleeping, more or less.

There would be no grave in Sokovia, no peaceful place beneath trees that wept white blossoms twice yearly over the dirt that held the pieces of their parents that were recovered. It had been so far out of the town square that once Pietro and Wanda settled in at the commune, they never made the walk again. Their parents weren’t actually there, anyway. Insofar as they could tell, they weren’t anywhere anymore.

That was the sensation that kept Wanda from eating or sleeping for long: tossing out the lasso to find the trace of her brother’s soul somewhere nearby and dragging back an empty rope. Surely, if he was out there somewhere, he would have found a way to communicate it to her by now. A sign in the form of a broken teacup, a name written on the fogged mirror – there were a thousand ways. But nothing had come to her; he had not made an appearance since the day she let go of his freshly washed body and watched as the medics placed him into the metal cradle.

_No promises_ was the company line nowadays. Dr. Cho had made sure Wanda understood that while this could heal bullet wounds if and only if it was able to successfully heal his atrophied heart and undo the brain damage that came from nearly a full half hour of being dead, it was not guaranteed. A few rounds of what surely constituted abuse of a corpse with a defibrillator and several new machines later, his body was being kept artificially alive, a machine hissing air into his lungs and electrode nodes stimulating his weak heart. His brain waves were nearly non-existent, low enough to have him declared brain dead in any conventional medical setting but not low enough to suggest the tissue couldn’t rebuild if the cradle did its job the way it’s supposed to on paper. Despite this possibility, Wanda had to be reminded that this was all experimental, not to mention highly unethical in most practices; it was paramount to raising the dead. There was still the chance that, even with the equipment shiny and newly healed, the vehicle may still remain unmanned, what with the absolute zero medical understanding of whether or not a person was a separate entity from their body and if so, where they went when that body shut down.

***

Wanda forces one foot in front of the other. She forces herself to keep eye contact with the people staring at her with the utmost pity. She excels at training and has even learned to levitate on her own, a skill she had tampered with in the past but never managed. Now, with her single-minded drive that exists solely to prevent her from thinking about anything else, she can achieve things that seemed like a pipe dream even against the memory of what all had brought her to this point. It feels like a story she tells instead of the truth when she recounts their story to Vision and eventually to Sam Wilson, who earns her trust with a sympathetic ear and his counseling-training ability to hold safe space for her when she needs the validation that the past was real, that it happened.

She tells no one they were in love. She doesn't really have to, it's painfully obvious to those who notice that kind of thing. No one asks, and she doesn't tell.

Clint tells her that her brother died a hero. He also tries to gently encourage her to let him go, take him off the machines. He says he wants him to be alive almost as much as she does, but that it just isn’t natural. She reminds him that neither is Steve Rogers, and the conversation stops there. She knows he’s only trying to do what his ethics insist is the right thing – she just doesn’t care.

***

Wanda is asked to testify against Hydra for their war crimes and human experimentation, and she agrees after some mulling. Standing before a tribunal, she watches as they bring out scientists and organizers alike; some of them she recognizes, some of them she can’t. She knows Pietro always had a better eye for faces than she did. They show her pictures of a wanted sniper named Zelig Witwer; she cannot confirm or deny his presence, having never seen him during her stay. She tells them about the commune, about crimes against Sokovia by the government and the UN’s failure to mitigate. She tells them about Alyosha and Vanya and Serge and while it feels like a betrayal of her hard won stiff upper lip, she can feel weight coming off her chest and shoulders every time she speaks their names out loud.

She speaks all their names out loud, every name she remembers. Alexei. Ekatarina. Elspet. Bron. Vash. Stieg. Kuba. On and on. They stop haunting her as much; she tries to sleep for as long as possible to avoid being awake but she no longer dreams of their executions.

They bring out a woman with long dark hair and dark eyes, and the sound that rips itself out of Wanda’s throat is the closest to an honest cry she’s had since her knees hit the dirty stone that day in Sokovia and she screamed for her dead brother. The primal sound haunted anyone who heard it - Tony hears that scream in his nightmares sometimes, the parting gift of two lives he knows he ultimately destroyed.

Here in this courtroom, though, it’s a cry of relief, of succor. The guards cannot stop either of them as the two women make a break for one another, colliding into one another and collapsing to the floor in a heap of sobbing as Wanda’s thin arms wrap tight for dear life around Ballato’s neck.

Tony throws some money at the problem after Wanda testifies that Ballato saved her life and begs for pardon on her behalf, partially because he knows what it means to go along with something you know is awful and partially because he hopes that in some small way it will balance the scales between himself and Wanda. Ballato is released to Stark Industries Laboratories and put to work in Research and Development under the watchful eye of United Nations, where she is determined to make sure they never once see a shred of the successful formula that created the twins as they were.

Wanda resents that money can buy freedom – and it doesn’t buy Tony any of her favor, not by a longshot – but Lindsay Ballato is the only person she has now that feels like they’re truly hers.

She sees her every day, even if it’s just over Skype.

***

Vision insists that he’s out there somewhere in the ether, his collection of energy still swirling somewhere near Wanda. His words are the only ones that bring her some measure of comfort; he talks to her about energy conservation, about Einstein and the theory of relativity and string theory and thermonuclear dynamics, about the idea that energy seeks familiar energy.

_He is, in all likelihood, still near you,_ Vision reminds her, _Every proton that ever bounced off of him, every beam of refracted light that allowed you to perceive him is still there._

_Then find him and bring him back_ , Wanda counters.

Vision says he’ll try but that it might be more difficult than that. If his dispersed atoms are no longer Pietro, no longer see themselves as a separate entity from the totality of the universe, he may not be so easily corralled back into a corporeal form.

_Yes he will_ , Wanda tells him, her cheek against the glass of the cradle as the goes in for her nightly visit, fingertips lightly grazing the metal frame, _Tell him that Wanda needs him. He will come back._

_If he hears me say his name, he will come back._

_I just have to find him so he can hear me._

 

***

 

 

 

 

FIN

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My deepest gratitude and thanks to each and every person who read, especially those who took the time to leave kudos and comment and share their ideas and feelings with me. I am humbled by your constantly uplifting words. <3
> 
> Thus ends our first journey with Wanda and Pietro. I will be continuing to write on AO3, I think - I wasn't sure if this would be my one-off performance but I think I'd like to keep going with various Marvel stuff. Please know that my door is always open, I routinely answer my comments and if you have any suggestions or requests of what you'd like to read, I'd love to hear it. 
> 
> Who knows? Maybe we'll come back to the Maximoffs shortly...

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [heartbeats](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4570230) by [lilacsandlostlovers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsandlostlovers/pseuds/lilacsandlostlovers)




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